This is the second part of the three-part series on ‘rise of misinformation and astroturfing’ as a part of the Justicemakers’ Writer’s Training Program, run in partnership with Agami and Ashoka’s Law For All Initiative. The first and third parts can be found here and here.
It’s June 2020, the first wave of covid-19; it’s been three months since the lockdowns started, six months since the epidemic was a pandemic. If you are lucky, you are at home, stuck in the same routine, with the same people, the same media cycle, and the same daily soaps.
For millions, the lockdowns brought in a different breed of problems, from unemployment to food safety, physical/mental health issues and lack of access to education. If you are a migrant labourer, you are still trying to get home. But this story isn’t about them.
It’s about a lot of things, but not them, no. It wasn’t then; it’s not now.
It’s June 2020; you’ve just found out that a prominent Bollywood actor was found dead in his apartment. As the news unravels, the police say it’s death by suicide. Everyone’s grieving on social media, condolences flood in, and everyone’s talking about mental health.
One week into the incident, you come across claims that it’s not suicide. But, a murder, an elaborate conspiracy, suddenly there are mass calls for a CBI probe, for the CM of Maharashtra to resign, for the arrest of the actor’s partner, the NCB to be involved. Police teams of two different states are working on it (a chief of one of these later quits and joins a political party in power in the face of Bihar elections.) Political parties are involved, and so is the national media.
Over the next few weeks and the coming months, you notice a sustained national outrage across social media, TV and print news, the biggest breaking story there is. #JusticeForSSR is what they call the campaign, and #SSRians they call themselves. The actor’s former partner is vilified and arrested. Other actors are called in for interrogation. The national media is on its own trip. So are the political parties.
In the middle of the biggest socio-economic and health crisis in decades, the entire nation seems to be demanding #JusticeForSSR.
Only, it is not.
This, my fellow friends, is what they call astroturfing.
Astroturfing is a form of manufactured and deceptive activity seeking to mimic autonomous individuals’ bottom-up/ grassroots activity. It is a campaign in which participants appear to be part of a genuine grassroots movement or sentiment, while it is in fact orchestrated centrally and top-down – thus the term Astroturf.
The Menace Of Astroturfing
Astroturfing is as old as mobilisation itself and has been used across time and technology. From Greek playwrights hiring bands of professional laughers to the Roman lawyers paying scores of spectators to attend public hearings and boo the opponents. From sitcoms overusing canned laughter to corporations like Philip Morris, forming groups fighting for “smokers’ rights”. (in one such campaign, they developed a PR strategy whereby anti-smokers were called “anti-Americans”. The timeless appeal to nationalism spell).
The internet and online mobilisation has only increased their reach and impact, whether mass orchestrated outrage against films or shows, like Tandav, or trends glorifying self-styled Godman who also happens to be sentenced for life. (What I find interesting about Rampal’s campaign is that it even has an active presence on Reddit.)
Recent investigations around “TekFog”- an app used to automate and manipulate trends and social media activity – give us a tiny peek into the realms of astroturfing.
But then what is real? How do you know if any online campaign is authentic or astroturfed? Because these accounts involved aren’t necessarily automated bots but most of the time, real humans like me and you.
Patterns
Sometimes looking at the traces left behind by accounts involved in astroturfing, you can find patterns that help you differentiate between an organic campaign from an astroturfed one.
Case Study
A 2019 paper titled “Political Astroturfing on Twitter: How to Coordinate a Disinformation Campaign” studies the South Korean National Information Service’s (NIS) disinformation campaign during the 2012 presidential election and tries to establish patterns that help us distinguish between an organic campaign and an astroturfed campaign.
The NIS was involved in an astroturfing campaign supporting the conservative candidate. Based on the data shared by Twitter and an analysis of over 1000 accounts involved in the campaign, the paper was able to establish significant patterns. A few interesting ones are:
1: Coordinated-Supervised activity: A 9-5 job.
The NIS accounts involved in the astroturfing campaign were found to be only active during office hours! While comparatively the activity of regular accounts talking about the elections, went up after the office hours. Similarly, the NIS accounts activity dipped towards the weekend, while regular accounts were found to be more active on the weekends.
This implies that the NIS accounts involved in this campaign saw it as a 9-5 job and only engaged when they were being supervised at work.
2: Message coordination and Copy-pasta
Message coordination is vital in any campaign, real or fake, given the collective aim they are working towards in a coordinated manner. Even organic campaigns use tweet banks and toolkits. But some patterns help us distinguish between organic movements and astroturfed ones. The astroturfers lack intrinsic motives that drive people in organic campaigns. They try to avoid working too hard and resort to shortcuts, like aggressive retweeting or even direct copypasta.
The researchers established over 150,000 instances where accounts were posting the exact tweet (co-tweeting) within a minute, while the same does not happen among groups of normal users.
Principal-agent problem
The paper’s authors use the principal/agent framework to explain these patterns.
A principal is someone who organises the campaign.
An agent is an incentivised person posing as a regular user.
While the principal or the instigators are driven by solid motives, the agents do not share the same and therefore resort to shortcuts, like copypasta, working only when supervised.
Agents tend to be driven by different incentives, like in the case of the #JusticeforSSR campaign, we find other sections of astroturfers driven by different motives. The BJP IT cell is driven by political incentives, media houses are driven by financial incentives and so on.
It’s March 2022; the NDA alliance has retained power in Bihar, all national news channels claim to be the winners of the TRP race. The mental health conversation is all but forgotten. Rhea Chakraborty is out on bail. NCB had almost stopped hounding the “Bollywood drug mafia”. The IT cell has claimed another victim through its astroturfing campaigns.
It’s March 2022; the Union government does not know how many migrant workers lost their lives walking home in the lockdown. ( Until July 2020, Over 970 of them were victims of road accidents, starvation, exhaustion and suicide). Every 4 out of 5 parents feel their kids enrolled in primary school have forgotten how to read and write after having missed on education in one of the longest school closures in the world. The pandemic has forced over 200 million citizens below the poverty line. Unemployment is rampant, so is malnourishment.
It’s March 2022 #JusticeForSSR still pops up occasionally across social media; justice, in general, does not.