Astroturfing

Astroturfing is a deceptive advertisement practice that is named after the fake grass used in sports fields, Astroturf.  I remember the early days of sports Astroturf where players described diving on the field to make a play and claiming it was like hitting concrete.  Hopefully, things have improved on the field of play, but Astroturfing in the conspiracy world still hits a hard wall instead of actually getting to a grass roots campaigns core ideas that may or may not have any real value.  

The term is relatively new, but deceptive advertisement has been one of those disinformation topics that has been around forever.  Your semi regular reminder here - misinformation and disinformation has been around forever, it’s just talked about a hell of a lot more in the Internet age.

Picture that you are a young, fresh out of college, averagish intelligence job seeker looking for you first employment.  The dreaded interview has been your downfall on a couple previous attempts.  You talk to a headhunter job placement specialist to get some tips.  Personally I think that entire industry is a sham, where the headhunters are more interested in taking credit for people that can sell themselves, but anyway.  The tip you get is to market yourself.  Whether you outright get to the point where you boldly lie has not been lied before or just do a better job at taking an interview, you are going to present yourself in the most favorable light.  Employers still haven’t figured out how to separate the prospect with narcissistic personality disorder from someone gung ho for the job that just wants to market themselves to maximize their salary and benefits.  The Internet still hasn’t figured out how to separate sock puppets, fake accounts, and bots from monetary and politically charged discourse.

These deceptive fakery based accounts exist merely to give the illusion of coolness to something that isn’t cool.  Instead of nailing the job interview by being cool, the toxic narcissist has mastered a lifestyle of pretending to be cool instead of acting consistently cool.  The toxic conspiracy ringleader has mastered the illusion of coolness by lying.

The topic has come up again recently because the movie, The Sound of Freedom, appears to have engaged in a common form of astroturfing.  The ticket sales don’t support the actual number of bodies in the seats.  Again, as further evidence this is not new Cult Leader Extraordinaire L. Ron Hubbard used this tactic for his Scientology books.  Instead of actually being on the best seller list on the merit of the published work the illusion of benefit is manufactured.  Millions of people bought this, wow it must be good!  Or it might get you involved in an organization with numerous human rights violations in its track record.

In the higher end of the scale world of conspiracy content, Alex Jones has mastered shameless self promotion to keep people engaged and talking about his baseless theories.  In the lower end, the gematria crowd doesn’t have the wherewithal to spend millions of dollars producing and repurchasing novels.  Especially not from a crowd being bilked for a couple of bucks a month on Patreon subscriptions.  Zach’s numbers don’t make sense in a lot of ways.  The Patreon subscriptions drop by roughly 20% at the start of the month when apparently Patreon accounting purges non paying accounts.  The number of viewers and likes versus the number of channel subscribers seems oddly disconnected.  And the existence of a significant other is either 0 or 1.  Which may not be a huge difference in a subtraction calculation, but throws a monkey wrench in a division problem to reach a percentage.  These things are carefully guarded secrets, or even completely legit and just odd looking.

However, there is a simpler regular occurrence that astroturfing likely happens on practically every video.  Where still in the realm of suspicious and not proven here, but we are allowed to note the red flag.  Like the new wannabe employee, shameless self promotion has never been a problem for Zach.  ( The old F2FT blog has the “spread the word banner”, still.)

Begging for likes.  During a livestream where only a couple hundred out of almost 29,000 subscribers show up, it’s not enough to accept that maybe somebody didn’t actually like the video enough to like it.  In the last week the most popular video has a shade under 9000 views and slightly over 500 likes.  The concern over whether it’s 500 likes or only 400 is out of proportion with the benefit.  Or people don’t want to be bothered or they forgot.  He doesn’t normally do the begging himself, granted he’s busy doing the livestream and talking instead of engaging in the live chat.  The begging for likes is relegated to the mid level lieutenant, the ones with the YouTube admin wrenches.  “Don’t forget to smash that like button!”  More like, “Don’t forget to give my content the illusion of coolness since it’s not actually cool!”

Another byproduct of astroturfing tactics is identifying a gung ho type newcomer.  Hey Mr. Travolta, you liked that?  I’m giving you special attention now.  <sucker>.  Don’t be a sucker.  Don’t show up for the movie just because someone else bought a ticket to not show up for the movie.  Instead of Grease you might get Battlefield Earth, although arguably you only showed up for grease because of Olivia Newton John.  And stop making your own YouTube channels and blogs which only serve as free advertisement for people who can’t convince real people to like content based on its own merits.