Astroturfing Information Megathread- revision 8

#Government Shills

• USA Today: The co-owner of a major Pentagon propaganda contractor publicly admitted that he was behind a series of websites used in an attempt to discredit two USA TODAY journalists who had reported on the contractor.

• The Guardian: British army creates team of Facebook warriors

• CBC News- Canadian government monitors online forums

• Washington Post: Global Engagement Center: The Homeland Security social media operation to "counter ISIS propaganda" in US Muslim communities and around the world.

• The Guardian: US spy operation to manipulate social media

• The Guardian: Israel organizes volunteers to flood the net with Israeli propaganda

• Glenn Greenwald: How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

• Behavioural Science Support for JTRIG’S Effects and Online HUMINT Operations

• Glenn Greenwald: Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet

• Chinese officials flood the Chinese internet with positive social media posts to distract their population

• Cass Sunstein, the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, wrote in 2008 that the government should hire 3rd parties to discredit conspiracy theories using internet shills.

• Wired: Clinton Staff and Volunteers Busted for Astroturfing [in 2007]

• USA Today: Businesses and organizations may refer to it as a tool for competitive advantage and marketing; but make no mistake, they are using the massive reach of social media and the Internet as a weapon. One U.S. 3-letter special agent said, "You could influence an election with this."

• Times of Israel - The internet: Israel’s new PR battlefield

• GCHQ’s “Chinese menu” of tools spreads disinformation across Internet- “Effects capabilities” allow analysts to twist truth subtly or spam relentlessly.

• The Guardian-With Israel's foreign ministry organising volunteers to flood news websites with pro-Israeli comments, Propaganda 2.0 is here

• The Guardian: Internet Astroturfing

• BBC News: US plans to 'fight the net' revealed

• Israel is paying internet workers to manipulate online content such as Wikipedia (2 minute video)

• Buzzfeed: Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America

• NY Times- From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

• NY Times: Effort to Expose Russia’s ‘Troll Army’ Draws Vicious Retaliation

• CENTCOM engages bloggers

• WIRED: Air Force Releases ‘Counter-Blog’ Marching Orders

• Military Report: Secretly ‘Recruit or Hire Bloggers’

• The Guardian: Israel ups the stakes in the propaganda war

• Huffington Post- Israel To Pay Students For Pro-Israeli Social Media Propaganda

• BBC News: China's Internet spin doctors

• Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people

• HBGary: Automated social media management

• Huffington Post- Exposing Cyber Shills and Social Media's Underworld

• Turkey's Government Forms 6,000-Member Social Media Team

• Why Reddit moderators are censoring Glenn Greenwald’s latest news story on shills

#Shilling in the Private Sector

• "Internet Reputation Management," founded by three partners in the New York area, recruits bloggers to write about clients on third-party sites, without necessarily disclosing that they're paid

• USA Today: Lord & Taylor settles FTC charges over paid Instagram posts

• Wired: Microsoft, through an outside agency, paid Machinima to produce positive videos about the Xbox One game machine, and many of the YouTube stars who accepted the deal failed to properly disclose that they were producing paid, sponsored content, not independent analysis.

• Slate: Want to Get Paid For TV Criticism? Shill for DISH.

• ADWEEK: Marketing on Reddit Is Scary, But These Success Stories Show Big Potential

• BBC news: Amazon targets 1,114 'fake reviewers' in Seattle lawsuit

• New York Times: Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, reached a settlement with the State of New York over its attempts to fake positive consumer reviews on the Web. The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites

• Samsung Electronics Fined for Fake Online Comments

#Shill Bots

• Wired: Get ready for the robot propaganda machine

• Forbes: From Tinder Bots To 'Cuban Twitter', Welcome To 'Cognitive Hacking'

• Wired: Pro-Government Twitter Bots Try to Hush Mexican Activists

• “Simon Z” operates Swenzy, which he says is based in the United States. It sells followers, likes, downloads, views and comments on social sites. His clients include celebrities, musicians and politicians who want to seem more popular than they really are. Governments also use his bots, he said.

#Shilling on Reddit specifically

• Hillary Clinton Super Pac and "strategic research and rapid response team designed to defend Hillary Clinton from baseless attacks" openly admits to shilling on Reddit.

• Wikileaks: Reddit cofounder consulting for Stratfor to bring in the social media dollars

• Shilling on Reddit is openly admitted to in this Forbes article

• What I learned selling my Reddit accounts

• http://www.boostupvotes.com/

• Reddit Secrets- Buy Reddit upvotes

• Reddit Secrets- Buy pre-aged, established Reddit accounts so your PR team can blend in

#Additional information

• The Gentleman's Guide To Forum Spies wiki

• US military studied how to influence Twitter users in Darpa-funded research

• TEDx Astroturf and manipulation of media messages (Sharyl Attkisson)

• "Changing the hive mind -- How social media manipulation affects everything" by Tim Weninger at TEDxUND

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#Criticism

Claim: "Americans should not worry about government shills because it is DoD policy to not target Americans with psychological operations or Military Information Support Operations."

The laws and policies protecting Americans only work if they are followed. Here is a case where two American journalists were targeted with online psyops. Here is a case where American senators were the victims of psyops by their own government. Here is an American citizen from Minnesota who was the target of a psyop. Also see the "Global Engagement Center" which targets US Muslim communities on social media to "combat ISIS propaganda." There must be many more operations against US citizens that have gone undetected. There is also nothing protecting Americans from psyops performed by allies of the US.

#What you should do about this

I made this thread in the hopes that it could be used as a citation. I still see people all over the web claiming that astroturfing either does not occur in the United States, is a mainly Russian problem, or that it's some rare thing not to be worried over.

The previous generation became somewhat aware of the manipulation in the media. Imagine how effective it would be if few people knew about it? That is what is happening today. We are being advertised to and subjected to propaganda without being aware of it, which is very dangerous. Not only that, but this is becoming automated. We must educate others about this problem before we are drowned out by bots.

Some of this stuff is automatically removed by Reddit, so you have to link to a thread that was manually approved in order to cite the information. Reddit mods have also been known to blatantly remove links like this (example here), so be sure that your comment or post actually shows up and stays up.

Feel free to also cite small bits of this post in your travels. Click "source" and you will be able to copy/paste the entire hyperlink(s).