Astroturfing--how a handful of paid operatives create false impressions of public opinion

On January 9, Washington Post columnist Harold Myerson posted a column titled "Despite what the critics are saying, Obamacare is working."

I just scored all 604 comments for this column, now that the commenting is pretty much wrapped up, and the results are telling:

Against the article & against the Affordable Care Act (ACA): 55%
For the article & for the ACA: 41%
Ambiguous: 4%

Of the anti-ACA comments, a majority were vitriolic rants laced with words like "socialist"
"Obummercare" and the like, accounting for a full third of all the comments.

Of the pro-ACA comments, a small minority were anti-right wing vitriolic rants--mostly in response to the hundreds of red-faced denunciations of all things Liberal/Democratic/Obama--accounting for 11% of all the comments.,

A very large percentage of the anti-ACA comments included expressions of contempt for the Washington Post.

It seems unlikely that this distribution of comments mirrors the demographics of the Washington Post's readership--especially since so many of the comments opposing Meyerson's column included statements that the Washington Post wasn't worth reading.

So--what accounts for this disparity? Where did all the antis come from, if they aren't WaPo readers? And what about the WaPo's paywall that limits nonsubscribers to commenting on only 10 articles a month?

The greatest likelihood is that they are the same kinds of operatives who the tobacco industry hired decades ago to pretend to be constitutents of Congressmen, inundating them with calls and letters and telegrams opposing tobacco regulation.

That is, paid Astroturfers.

Anyone can validate my numbers by devoting a few hours to totting up the comments on this thread. And anyone can see what the current state of the art is in right wing Astroturfing with a little research. It includes "persona management" software that can give one operative up to 100 different online identities, each with a unique IP address.

So much for the WaPo paywall, as this one comment thread proves. I hope the WaPo comes up with a way to control these trolls-for-hire. They're making reasoned discourse hard to do there. And on any other major newspaper's comment threads on issues where wealthy special forces want to game the system.

Should newspapers charge for online content?

Yes, if they're major national/international newspapers with high quality original content.

And if the pricing is appropriate to the online world rather than the old physical newspaper delivered to your doorstep world.

The Washington Post is planning to implement what's called a "paywall" this summer, and they've floated the idea of charging $180/year for online subscriptions, requiring them for readers who want to access more than 20 articles per month.

Here's what I wrote their ombudsman-equivalent:

There are 2 ways of looking at a paywall: improving the newspaper's revenue & improving the reader's experience.

1. Improving the newspaper's revenue

Looks like the Washington Post is thinking of pricing access compared to getting home delivery--hence the idea floated by WaPo of charging $180/year. However, most of the WaPo's potential online subscribers are not considering this as an alternative to home delivery--we're all over the country & already have local newspapers.

We are not going to pay $180/year for just the national content of the WaPo. I doubt most of us would pay more than a tenth of that. I predict the WaPo will wind up stepping over dollars to pick up nickels if it pursues such an ill-considered pricing policy. It will make far, far more money off cheap per-user pricing than by limiting its online active readership to a relative handful of affluent local subscribers.

At the very least you should consider a low price for potential subscribers who live outside the physical newspaper's distribution area, & therefore have no need or use for its local content.

Another group excluded by high pricing is retired people living on a fixed income.

2. Improving the reader's experience

News/opinion consumption has become an interactive phenomenon. Readers want to have their say, and so the comment threads of articles have become significant in a way that old-school newspapermen might not realize.

The problem is that the comment threads on topics that affect corporate profits or major political advantage have been rendered useless because they're infested by paid shills using persona management software, with one shill having up to 70 online identities. These shills would not have to pay a subscription fee because they could just manipulate their identities. You can read about it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/what-is-astroturfing

Find a solution that blocks astroturfers or pricing becomes irrelevant....See More

 

We are Mexico.

Today's Washington Post editorial reads: "Inaction trumps problem-solving when immigration is involved." Here's my answer:

Dear Washington Post editorial board:

When over 2/3 of Americans oppose something fiercely, that means the opposition is bipartisan.

You wouldn't believe that from all the Tea Party nutballs weighing in here on this comment thread, but whether they're nutballs or not, on this particular issue HALF of Democrats agree with them.

So you can't airily dismiss all opposition as simply nativist/racist/xenophobic opposition, or act as if it's purely an issue with those knuckle-dragging Republican troglodytes.

And yes we 2/3 realize it's impractical for to round up and deport every citizen of another country who's here illegally, as every amnesty-proposer from President Obama (when he was still campaigning for the job) on down has stated.

But that's a false choice. They won't disappear magically, but they didn't appear magically either. Every blessed one of them is a citizen of another country, came here from that country, and is a documented person in that country, and is legally entitled to return to that country.

They can return exactly the same way they came--on foot if need be, though I'd be glad for America to pay for a one way bus ticket for any that wanted it.

And if you want to propose something there's a shred of a chance we'll accept, don't talk to us about amnesty until the vast flood across our southern border becomes a trickle.

See, we remember what happened in 1986. We got real amnesty coupled with fake enforcement.

And the government has exactly as much motivation to pull that trick today as it did then. Corporate exploiters of low-skilled labor want it, many Mexican Americans want it, and the Catholic Church wants it--oh, and a lot of labor unions and the Democratic Party leadership want it.

But we won't get fooled again, to quote The Who.

We want America to decide who comes here, not the ruling class of Mexico, which is seeking to export Mexico's self-inflicted overpopulation problem here (Mexico went from 13.1 million in 1900 to 20 million in 1940 to 111 million today).

Mexico's ruling class isn't stupid. They have an illegal immigration problem too, with people coming from even poorer countries. Their solution is a very sensible set of immigration laws.

I think it would be a great gesture of respect for Mexico if we adopted its immigration laws, with the addition of some high tech stuff like biometric ID.

You can read about it here:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010-05-25-mexico-migrants_N.htm

But in short, it's tougher than Arizona's--and requires ALL state and local law enforcement authorities to enforce the federal law (apparently Mexican president Felipe Calderon is unaware of Mexican law BTW, given what he said on the floor of Congress).

Plus it prohibits mass immigration that would change Mexico's demographic character--in other words, it defends Mexico's own culture from being morphed into something alien.

And as for family reunification, Mexican immigration law is OK with that IF and only IF the immigrant takes complete responsibility for the care of anyone he or she brings to this country under his or her aegis. They're welcome if the original immigrant will support them and cost our country not one cent.

Isn't Mexican immigration law great?

BTW when Americans bring up Mexican immigration law to leftists, guess what they say? "We're not Mexico." As if that ends the discussion.

Well actually we ARE Mexico. We're both sovereign nations, each with a distinctive national culture and language. We both have a severe illegal immigration problem. We both have a similar income distribution today, thanks to Wall Street's Masters of the Universe reconfigureing Wall Street to enrich themselves through money manipulation instead of fulfilling its original purpose of financing American businesses that actually make something.

And Mexico isn't a poor nation. That right, it's not. By UN estimates its poverty level ranks #37 out of some 140 nations. The average Bangladeshi would think he'd died and gone to heaven if he could live in Mexico.

So yes we are Mexico.

And to my fellow amnesty opponents--get the word out: let's all tell Congress we want to adopt Mexico's immigration law.

Now that's "comprehensive immigration reform" a vast majority of Americans would go for.

As for the 12-20 million citizens of other countries living here illegally--mostly from Mexico or parts south--they're welcome to apply for a visa in their home country, and when the unemployment rate for American unskilled laborers falls below 5% and the Mexicans now living here are actually assimilated into American society...we can think about letting more come here.

response to WaPo editorial "Arizona's Immigration 2-Step"

Arizona's Immigration Two-Step
PHOENIX -- Traumatized by a tidal wave of illegal immigrants, Arizona last year enacted the nation's most pitiless law to punish employers who hire undocumented workers. Now state lawmakers, having proved that they mean business -- even if it means killing off businesses -- are reconnecting with ...

By Lee Hockstader- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2008/04/20/AR2008042001755.html

Comments

ehkzu wrote:

This article isn't bad journalism. It's an op-ed piece--an opinion piece. It's not required to be fair, balanced, or factual. It's required to advocate something forcefully and skilfully.

For bad journalism, look at the article "Researchers Fear Southern Fence Will Endanger Species Further" in yesterday's Post. That article--not an editorial--argues that we shouldn't build a border fence because it gets in the way of wildlife.

However, the writer failed to note that her argument applies equally to ALL fences EVERYWHERE--along with roads, cities, suburbs, farms, shipping, and air traffic.

Nearly all the Post's articles on immigration are equally one-sided propaganda pieces.

But even though Hockstader's screed isn't bad journalism, it is bad editorializing.

It substitutes cheap shots (mainly namecalling) throughout in lieu of making actual arguments for his unstated but clear premise: that Mexico's ruling elite should be allowed to outsource its overpopulation crisis to America, along with its entire social welfare system.

Oh, and that anyone who objects to this invasion is such a knuckle-dragger that one needn't bother to even argue with him. A few put-downs like "nativist" or "racist" will suffice.

Propaganda differs from editorials in using emotional arguments instead of sweet reason.

I could teach a class on underhanded demagoguery using this article as an example.

Aside from the pervasive namecalling, some less obvious dirty tricks appear in this piece:

a. Hockstader only makes sense if this were the first amnesty. Instead it will be the third, the last one being in 1986.

Only now it's up to 20M illegals instead of 3M. The result of that real amnesty combined with fake enforcement was that even more Mexican citizens made themselves at home here. Nothing he says in this editorial would change that consequence.

And then what? HALF of Mexico's 100+M population wants to move here. In Hockstader's mental universe, is ANY number of Mexicans too much? And if there is a too-much number, what do we do when we finally reach it?

b. Hockstader's writing embodies the contempt for mainstream American culture common to the academic Left. America bad, Mexico good. That's why he speaks of opposition to illegal immigration so contemptuously.

It seems that for him American culture has no intrinsic value. So massively altering it across California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas is just fine.

OTOH Mexican culture is to be revered and celebrated (never mind that Mexican-American high school dropout rates and incidence of teen pregnancy are the highest of any sizeable socioethnic group in America).

Of course these are inexpensive attitudes for Hockstader to sport. He doesn't live here in the Southwest, where Mexicans are invading in such large numbers that they're supplanting multicultural communities with monolithic Spanish-speaking ones. Then again, if American culture is to be disdained, who cares? Not the media elites living around the Beltway.

And of course he doesn't move in the social circles of folks who have lost 5-20% of their earning power due to competition from illegals. His childrens' schools aren't crumbling under the weight of hordes of kids who don't even speak or write good Spanish, much less Ingles.

He can wish this plague of peasants on working-class Americans in the Southwest without spilling his mocha latte.

This illegal immigration by millions of Mexicans has no historical precedent, either for the sheer numbers or for its all coming from one other culture. The last big wave (around the turn of the 20th century) came from many countries--though they too brought down wages.

In fact, precious few Mexicans lived in America in large numbers until recently.

In 1940 Mexican-Americans represented .5% of the population--and Mexico's population was 20 million. Now they're, what, 14% of our population--more than blacks--and in Mexico the population has exploded to over 100 million.

News flash: we didn't do that. They did it to themselves, looong before NAFTA. They did it partly because Mexican society is dominated by a stuck-in-the-19th century religion that says even condoms are murder--much less IUDs or morning after pills.

The irony of ironies is that the liberal establishment used to love America's working poor. But the liberal establishment is a fickle lot. Now not even blacks--who have been most impacted by illegal alien labor--can divert Hockstader's adoring gaze from Los Mexicanos.

Not that I have anything against Mexicans myself. I speak Spanish and have studied the anthropology of Mexico's Indians. I just happen to like having my culture and my language in my country.

By Hockstader's principles I should be able to move to Mexico with a million other Americans and demand our rights to get Mexican citizenship but not learn Spanish--even to vote...because it's our right to impose our culture on theirs.

Why?

Beats me. Ask him.