Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world.

Online political astroturfing-hidden information campaigns in which a political actor mimics genuine citizen behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online-has become prevalent on social media. Such inauthentic information campaigns threaten to undermine the Internet's promise to more equitable participation in public debates. We argue that the logic of social behavior within the campaign bureaucracy and principal-agent problems lead to detectable activity patterns among the campaign's social media accounts. Our analysis uses a network-based methodology to identify such coordination patterns in all campaigns contained in the largest publicly available database on astroturfing published by Twitter. On average, 74% of the involved accounts in each campaign engaged in a simple form of coordination that we call co-tweeting and co-retweeting. Comparing the astroturfing accounts to various systematically constructed comparison samples, we show that the same behavior is negligible among the accounts of regular users that the campaigns try to mimic. As its main substantive contribution, the paper demonstrates that online political astroturfing consistently leaves similar traces of coordination, even across diverse political and country contexts and different time periods. The presented methodology is a reliable first step for detecting astroturfing campaigns

Some Peer-to-Peer, Democratically and Voluntarily Produced Thoughts About \u27The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,\u27 by Yochai Benkler

In this review essay, Bartow concludes that The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler is a book well worth reading, but that Benkler still has a bit more work to do before his Grand Unifying Theory of Life, The Internet, and Everything is satisfactorily complete. It isn\u27t enough to concede that the Internet won\u27t benefit everyone. He needs to more thoroughly consider the ways in which the lives of poor people actually worsen when previously accessible information, goods and services are rendered less convenient or completely unattainable by their migration online. Additionally, the Internet is easy enough to be optimistic enough as a technological achievement, but just as nuclear fission can be harnessed both for electrical power generation and annihilating destruction, the raw communicative capabilities can\u27t be qualitatively assessed without reference to specific content. Pornography and its symbiotic relationship to the Internet require thoughtful scrutiny. Astroturf and other targeted attempts to instrumentally distort democratic discourse need to be analyzed and possibly also rechanneled or contained. The impact of moving resources online upon people who substantially live in an offline, analog world, needs to be contemplated more fully

Platform Advocacy and the Threat to Deliberative Democracy

Businesses have long tried to influence political outcomes, but today, there is a new and potent form of corporate political power—Platform Advocacy. Internet-based platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Uber, mobilize their user bases through direct solicitation of support and the more troubling exploitation of irrational behavior. Platform Advocacy helps platforms push policy agendas that create favorable legal environments for themselves, thereby strengthening their own dominance in the marketplace. This new form of advocacy will have radical effects on deliberative democracy. In the age of constant digital noise and uncertainty, it is more important than ever to detect and analyze new forms of political power. This Article will contribute to our understanding of one such new form and provide a way forward to ensure the exceptional power of platforms do not improperly influence consumers and, by extension, lawmakers

Digital astroturfing in politics: Definition, typology, and countermeasures

In recent years, several instances of political actors who created fake grassroots activity on the Internet have been uncovered. We propose to call such fake online grassroots activity digital astroturfing, and we define it as a form of manufactured, deceptive and strategic top-down activity on the Internet initiated by political actors that mimics bottom-up activity by autonomous individuals. The goal of this paper is to lay out a conceptual map of the phenomenon of digital astroturfing in politics. To that end, we introduce, first, a typology of digital astroturfing according to three dimensions (target, actor type, goals), and, second, the concept of digital astroturfing repertoires, the possible combinations of tools, venues and actions used in digital astroturfing efforts. Furthermore, we explore possible restrictive and incentivizing countermeasures against digital astroturfing. Finally, we discuss prospects for future research: Even though empirical research on digital astroturfing is difficult, it is neither impossible nor futile

Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201

Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog Streams

Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We introduce an extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling massive streams of public microblogging events. We describe a Web service that leverages this framework to track political memes in Twitter and help detect astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S. political elections. We present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by our service. Finally, we discuss promising preliminary results on the detection of suspicious memes via supervised learning based on features extracted from the topology of the diffusion networks, sentiment analysis, and crowdsourced annotations

RISK TOO MUCH TO GAIN TOO LITTLE: ASTROTURFING STRATEGY, ITS PRESUMED EFFECTS AND LIMITATIONS

Astroturfing strategies are deceptive mechanisms that hide the source of the information from the publics. By not disclosing the persuasive intent and identity of the sources behind these communicative efforts, organizations expect to get more benefits from their crafted messages. However, the discovery of astroturfing and the real source of the messages could produce negative effects for the organization, often triggering the anger of publics.  Effects of astroturfing differ depending on the situation: successful astroturfing, failed one, and disclosure of the identity of patron and its persuasive or promotional intent. This study creates three possible astroturfing situations and compares their relative effects on credibility, purchase intention, attitude towards the brand and megaphoning produced across the situations, using two different brands scenarios. Based on the findings, the potential costs for the communicators, organizations, and public relations as a profession generated by astroturfing strategies are also discussed. Keywords: astroturfing, deception, effects, public relations, transparency

Challenges for Good Government Reformers in California: Shadow Lobbying & Astroturfing

Lobbying reform in California’s capital presents a complex policy problem for good government advocates and policymakers. Lobbyists have a large influence on political and policy matters in the state legislature and executive branch. Reform proponents naturally see the oversized influence of lobbyists as a problem. However, how big of a problem is lobbying? Further, what efforts underway now address lobbying? Lobbyists are defined in California law with a monetary and time limit requirement. We can look at current law to understand the failings of regulatory bodies and how the law fails to properly oversee lobbying activity. While there is not one particular solution to combat the loopholes in state law surrounding lobbyists, every option should be considered given the fortunate policy windows facing reformers due to the California Strategies scandal and recent news stories about astroturfing. The ongoing problem with the definition of a lobbyist is the practice of shadow lobbying. The issue of shadow lobbying arises when individuals operate in the grey area of what the legal definition is so they do not register with the Secretary of State and are not overseen by the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC). Shadow lobbying prevents the public from understanding what legislation or executive action that individual is attempting to influence or alter. In order to properly maximize good government reform on lobbying activity, Lobbyists should be defined as an individual receiving compensation by an employer for attempting to influence regulatory, executive or legislative action. Further, if an individual is being paid by a third party to speak out on an issue not as that individual, then they should register with the Secretary of State. Current regulatory requirements also allow employers to not fully disclose spending activities, shrouding the complete financial priorities and actions by special interest groups in Sacramento. Out of the top ten lobbying spenders during the first six months of 2013, 68 percent of expenditures were not itemized and disclosed to the public (See Appendix 1). The staggering amount of undisclosed money, totaling over $10 million, presents reformers an opportunity to publicize an issue that does not get a lot of attention. The lack of disclosure is not a partisan issue. SEIU-UHW and Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association hid 98 percent of their expenditures for the first six months of 2013 (See Appendix 1). Without the full disclosure of expenditures, the public is not able to determine if an employer is spending monies to influence policy and whether that employer is hiring strategists, media personnel, and political staff to sway public officials indirectly. The appearance of ordinary community support could cause legislators and staff to infer that a bill is popular or must be stopped based on the outpouring of constituent engagement, that currently could be funded by corporate or special interests not disclosed to the public. While this paper does not focus on the strategic actions taken by good government groups, focusing on pragmatic and possible reforms is crucial to regulating lobbying. Competing reform concepts often overwhelm advocates as they search for solutions to reform and regulate campaign finance and lobbying laws. Reformers often focus on larger case studies to pinpoint the problem and solution to a good government issue, such as the Citizens United ruling and the upcoming McCutcheon case before the United States Supreme Court. While those reformers do have a point about focusing on Citizens United, their aims are not realistic given the immense difficulty in amending the U.S. Constitution and that money is considered free speech. This paper reviews possible strategies ranging from the ballot box to policy solutions based in Sacramento to determine if another narrative is possible for reformers in California to latch onto for lobbying reform, rather than just looking at campaign finance reform and federal issues.Reformers and policymakers face a challenge on how to tackle a diverse and complex policy -- the Political Reform Act (PRA). In addition, examining previous legislation in the state legislature that addressed lobbying reform gives this paper guidelines for current solutions to the policy problems examined here. A multi-dimensional approach to tackle the problems of astroturfing and shadow lobbying is necessary to restore regulatory oversight -- already enshrined in state law -- for the FPPC to remain committed to protecting California’s democratic principles. The FPPC, with a limited budget and staff resources, must be given every available tool and regulatory authority to properly oversee how public policy is affected by the lobbying community. The law currently allows loopholes to exist to allow shadow lobbying and astroturfing by employers and lobbyists. Closing these loopholes now could address the shortfalls in regulatory oversight and ensure disclosure is prominent, accessible and clear. While focusing our attention just to the FPPC would be easier, reformers must look at how lobbyists are defined and if a strategy based outside of Sacramento is worth pursuing

Can methodological requirements be fulfilled when studying concealed or unethical research objects? The case of astroturfing

Scientific soundness is key in the development of research designs. Methodological choices bear the responsibility to demonstrate its obtainment. However, it is challenging to abide by these standards while dealing with hidden, masked or unethical objects. In this article, we share the various strategies employed to aim at a sound scientific process in spite of astroturfing’s characteristics and of the methodological orientations it dictates. Facing the dilemma between the importance of scientific value and the richness of inductive and exploratory approaches, we question the influence of positivist research standards in communication studies. We fear these requirements may limit their development