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.

Don't feed the trolls--I know it's hard, but don't feed them. Really. Don't.

My first experience with a troll was on an immigration forum, back when the NY Times hosted subject forums & not just comment threads on articles.

And she was a liberal troll. They aren't just right wing nutjobs. Any nutjob will do.

She seemed reasonable at first. Very collegial with other participants, as long as they agreed with her pro-illegal immigrant stance. But she was quick to call anyone who demurred a troll (and some were, to be sure), and if something fired her up she'd spam the thread, cutting and pasting in lengthy lyrics to pro-illegal immigrant ballads and so much other stuff the thread became nearly useless.

Things haven't gotten better. Now whenever an article on a hot button topic has a comment thread, it seems like 2/3 of the comments will be from trolls.

They're troll comments because they're usually rants filled with ad hominem attacks and raising red herring issues. The trolls always accept anything anyone on their side says at face value, while denying that anything said on the other side has the slightest credibility, and further claiming that it's the product of a vast conspiracy.

Usually trollspam is obvious, due to the level of invective and the semiliterate writing. It's usually offtopic as well. For example, trolls flooded a recent Washington Post op-ed piece advocating more involvement of scientists in public forums to combat disinformation campaigns about climate change, evolution and the like.

But there's a more sinister kind. These are usually long posts, literate-seeming, and seeming to raise plausible objections to climate change, evolution, atheism, abortion etc. I say "seeming" because the objections are almost always red herrings--things that have already been raised and settled within the valid community of thought/knowledge of the field being discussed.

These posts always draw equally long, literate answers from valid members of the community of thought who've gotten sucked into the trap. It's a trap because it usually diverts people's brainpower from the real issues to phony ones and diverts the comment thread into topics of the opponents' choosing--always variations of the "have you quit beating your wife? Yes or No." attack. Thus the climate change opponents want to divert climate change threads onto discussions of "Climategate"--a pseudoscandal with no bearing on the real issues.

Seems like most of the trollspam comes from the same cranky old coots who call into CSPAN talk shows and all those AM radio talk shows. In my stereotype they usually have a thick hick Southern accent and sound like they're red-faced and shouting.

We got to see them in the flesh at the congressional town hall meetings on healthcare.

And like those meetings, these attacks appear to be orchestrated to varying degrees.

Whether orchestrated or not, they fill comment threads with so much chaff that they make many of them nearly useless--as well as leaving average readers with a false impression of how representative these nutjobs are.

Even if you think there's no such thing as human-caused climate change, that we didn't evolve, that abortion is a mortal sin etc.--you shouldn't approve of dirty, anti-democratic tactics used in support of such stances. If you do, you're saying that your positions can't be defended honestly. What does that say about such positions?

As for the issue of whether these threadspammings are orchestrated...from the point of view of the far right, they do disrupt "enemy" communications and create misleading impressions. And they are diverse enough to give all readers something, from the literate-seeming to the thug shouters writing in all caps. It's not like the crude old days when a congressman would get thousands of identical letters. These are all different...they still say the same things, though.

The thing that makes me suspicious of orchestration is how many comments come from people who are obviously not real readers of the publication--and how quickly they come. Thus you'll have someone writing at a 5th grade level, commenting on an editorial on Scientific American Magazine's website--and doing so shortly after the editorial was published. I've been reading SciAm for decades. I know what the readership is like. These drooling nutjobs aren't part of it.

So where'd they come from? How did they learn about this editorial? Who told them? And if SciAm, why not the NYTimes and Washington Post and everything else. The issues involved generally have seriously big money weighing in--for example, energy companies like Exxon on climate change. Exxon has spent many, many millions of dollars campaigning against it. Just a few of those dollars would be sufficient to cover having a few dozen operatives tracking every relevant publication and communicating via websites with their simian shock troops.

It's what I'd do if I worked for Exxon and had no morals whatsoever.

Welcome to the Trolliverse

Recently (OK, I'm a slow learner!) I've started to realize that comment threads online are often stuffed with comments that appear out of place--i.e., they seem to be not written by valid participants of that forum, or by actual readers of that publication.

You've probably noticed the same, at least subliminally.

It's becoming clear to me that many forums are stuffed with ringers, falling into three groups:

1. Lone operators, usually ideologue cranks, who have no life. They go to forums to flame real participants in hopes of triggering powerful angry responses. This achieves what's known as negative intimacy. Same thing as some angry divorced people strive for with their exes.Negative intimacy is safer emotionally than positive intimacy. It requires no social skills. And there's no risk of rejection. In positive intimacy you tell someone "I like you" and the other can say "Well I don't like you." Crushing. But if you tell them "You suck" nothing is risked. So on a primal level it's safe.

You can spot them because usually they're functioning on a more primitive level than the people they're attacking, so it quickly becomes clear that they're interlopers. I once got such a flame for this blog. I had to edit out a bunch of cursing in order to run it.

Often the flamers pick up enough of the language used by people on the forum to parrot it--thus with global warming forums, they use terms like "junk science" and "scientific method" but they don't actually know what these mean. But they don't need to--they just need to wield them such as to generate a response--the angry response they need. Or at least think they need.

2. Volunteer ideologues directed by like-minded websites or talk radio hosts to mount a blitzkrieg attack on designated forums. This is a version of a DNS (Denial of service) executed on a human rather than programmatic level. The purpose is twofold:

a) to simply disrupt the conversation and deny one's opponents a forum by filling it with distractions, chatter, and vicious attacks;

b) give the impression that a large part of the public--or at least of the constituency of that website/special interest group--is actually against the issue most valid participants of that website actually advocate, or vice versa. It's fifth column work designed to sow dissension and despair and make people feel like they alone hold their beliefs--to doubt their beliefs.

3. Paid hit men (and women) who do the same as #2. I did some digging on the Net and found links to a couple of sites that offer this service. The ones I saw appear to be rightist/corporatist. I don't know whether they'd do the same for someone on the other side, but I suppose it's possible. And I don't know if there are left wing services that do this for money.

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For example, Scientific American Magazine's website recently ran an op-ed piece about global warming and the Copenhagen conference. The comments thread was flooded with global warming deniers along with extremely hostile attacks on anyone advocating acting to mitigate global warming, along with general attacks on scientists as a group.

I've subscribed to the magazine for decades, and I know what its audience is like. These attacking commentors were obviously not Scientific American readers. Not necessarily because they were global warming deniers, but because of the character of the attacks.

I asked one of these guys point blank in the comments thread whether he actually read the magazine, and his response showed to my satisfaction that he didn't.

The first time the LA Times permitted comments on opinion pieces, the comments were flooded by psycho spamming. They had to shut down the comments threads and try to figure out how to deal with this. I don't know whether they've come up with a plan.

Some of the most insidious are Creationists on forums discussing evolution. They get fed questions to ask, ask them, then scientists waste countless cycles trying to reason with them. But all they ever get is the next set of superficially scientific-sounding questions. Thus they tie up the forum by moving the subject towards their set of preoccupations, which no one who understands evolution has.

It's easiest to spot such trolling on a website whose subject matter you know a lot about. But really, trolls--whether paid, volunteer, or unemployed guys living in their parents' basement--generally come off about the same.

They all fight dirty--and it shows.