Astroturfing & Shilling

“shilling or “astroturfing,” is a way to create a fake grass-roots movement online, as well as corporate and government defenders on social media who masquerade as average citizens. This should be mandatory reading for everyone who uses social media because we should all be aware of the various ways corporations and governments manipulate social media in their favor. This post is split up into sections: Government shills, corporate shills, bots, Reddit manipulation, studies on bot detection, and some additional information.

Government Shills

• The Guardian: British army creates team of Facebook warriors
• The Guardian: US military studied how to influence Twitter [and Reddit] users in Darpa-funded research
• Vice: Your Government Wants to Militarize Social Media to Influence Your Beliefs
• CBC News- Canadian government monitors online forums
• NY Times: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz (Cambridge Analytica)
• 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.
• Washington Post: Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election
• Information on the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act,” a US government funded shilling operation to counter Russian propaganda online.
• 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.
• Wikileaks email from Alec Ross, Senior Advisor for Innovation, Office of the Sec of State. He discusses “amplifying messages” on Twitter using a person named ‘Marcelo Tas.’ “More importantly, they don’t think of it as something the U.S. Government is pushing out, but rather Marcelo Tas.”
• Ex -MMA fighter and ex-police officer exposes corrupt police practices, which includes infiltrating Reddit communities and becoming moderators in order to manipulate and censor information.
• Times of Israel: Israeli government paying bilingual students to spread propaganda online primarily to international communities without having to identify themselves as working for the government. “The [student] union will operate computer rooms for the project…it was decided to establish a permanent structure of activity on the Internet through the students at academic institutions in the country.”
• The Intercept: Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies.” TigerSwan attempted a counterinformation campaign by creating and distributing content critical of the protests on social media.
• WashingtonPost: Obama pick for NSA review panel wanted paid, pro-government shills in chat rooms (Thread with source paper.)
• Wired: Clinton Staff and Volunteers Busted for Astroturfing [in 2007]
• The Independent: Massive British PR firm caught on video: “We’ve got all sorts of dark arts…The ambition is to drown that negative content and make sure that you have positive content online.” They discuss techniques for managing reputations online and creating/maintaining 3rd-party blogs that seem independent.
• The Guardian: US spy operation to manipulate social media
• BBC: Vietnam admits deploying bloggers to support the Communist Party’s policies, operates a network of nearly 1,000 “public opinion shapers”.
• Glenn Greenwald: How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations
• The Intercept: 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
• The Guardian: Chinese officials flood the Chinese internet with positive social media posts to distract their population
• The Guardian: Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown – Social science is being militarised to develop ‘operational tools’ to target peaceful activists and protest movements. “Minerva”-funded social scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the “study of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements,” he said, including how “to counteract grassroots movements.”
• Bloomberg: How to Hack an Election [and influence voters with fake social media accounts]
• 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
• Arstechnica: GCHQ’s menu of tools spreads disinformation across Internet- “Effects capabilities” allow analysts to twist truth subtly or spam relentlessly.
• 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: Effort to Expose Russia’s ‘Troll Army’ Draws Vicious Retaliation
• Raw Story: CENTCOM engages bloggers
• Wired: Air Force Releases ‘Counter-Blog’ Marching Orders
• Wired: Military Report: Secretly ‘Recruit or Hire Bloggers’
• The Guardian: Israel ups the stakes in the propaganda war
• BBC News: China’s Internet spin doctors
• Raw Story: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people
• DailyKos: HBGary: Automated social media management
• Huffington Post- Exposing Cyber Shills and Social Media’s Underworld
• Wall Street Journal: Turkey’s Government Forms 6,000-Member Social Media Team
• The Bush and Gore campaigns of 2000 used methods similar to the Chinese government for conducting “guided discussions” in chatrooms designed to influence citizens
• Salon: Why Reddit moderators are censoring Glenn Greenwald’s latest news story on shills

Shilling in the Private Sector

• Yahoo News: Last month the FTC issued warnings to celebrities who plugged products on their Instagram accounts without clearly identifying their relationships with brands. The letters were meant to educate the celebrities on posting without violating the organization’s disclosure guidelines.
• PBS Frontline Documentary – Generation Like
• 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.
• The Verge: Anti-net neutrality spammers are impersonating real people to flood FCC comments
• Vice: Trolls Paid by a Telecom Lobbying Firm Keep Commenting on My Net Neutrality Articles
• In a New York investigation dubbed “Operation Clean Turf,” dentists, lawyers, an ultra-sound clinic, Staten Island bus company US Coachways, a charter bus operator, a teeth-whitening service, a laser hair-removal chain and an adult entertainment club were caught buying fake reviews. The fake review companies posted on sites like Citysearch, Google, Yahoo and Yelp.
• New York Times: When a Company’s Product Is Under Fire, One Option is to Plant a Defender in the Chat Room
• Time: Social Media Manipulation? When “Indie” Bloggers and Businesses Get Cozy
• New York Times: Give Yourself 5 Stars? Online, It Might Cost You
• Chicago Tribune: Nutrition for sale: How Kellogg worked with ‘independent experts’ to tout cereal
• Kim Kardashian was paid to post a selfie on Instagram and Twitter advertising a pharmaceutical product. Sent to 42 million followers on Instagram and 32 million on Twitter, this illegal advertisement did not contain any risk information or language specifying that it was a paid endorsement.
• Warner Brothers fined for paying YouTube celebs to promote game without properly disclosing that the videos were paid endorsements.
• Gamers promote gaming-gambling site on youtube by pretending to hit jackpot without disclosing that they own the site. They tried to retroactively write a disclosure covering their tracks, but were caught.
• “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
• Slate: Want to Get Paid For TV Criticism? Shill for DISH.
• Sony viral marketing campaign exposed (2006). The company admits they ran the shady advertising campaign.
• 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 [in Taiwan]

Shill Bots

• Russian bots were active on Reddit last year, from /r/RussiaLago
• BBC- How online chatbots are already tricking you- Intelligent machines that can pass for humans have long been dreamed of, but as Chris Baraniuk argues, they’re already among us. The ramifications of astroturfing are in fact so serious that the US Department of Defense funded research to detect chatbots.
• Wired: Powered by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, propaganda bots will soon run on genetic algorithms that let their ideas and messaging evolve, based on the resonance and effectiveness of previous messages. We are likely to see versions of these bots deployed on US audiences as part of the 2016 presidential election campaigns.
• BBC: More than four times as many tweets were made by automated accounts in favour of Donald Trump around the first US presidential debate as by those backing Hillary Clinton, a study says.
• Discover Magazine: Researchers Uncover Twitter Bot Army That’s 350,000 Strong
• The Rise of Social Bots
• Forbes: From Tinder Bots To ‘Cuban Twitter’, Welcome To ‘Cognitive Hacking’
• Wired: Pro-Government Twitter Bots Try to Hush Mexican Activists

Information about shilling on Reddit

• User pushes InfoWars links on Reddit, eventually admits to working for Infowars.
• 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.
• User posts video using GoPro, gets video to front page, admits in comments that GoPro sent him free cameras in exchange for advertising. (archive: http://archive.is/ICGrl)
• Top mod of /r/Mechanical_Gifs tries to sell subreddit on ebay for 999.00 dollars.
• How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts – According to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it ‘til they made it.
• Shill posts picture of a dog in a hammock with the brand clearly visible without indicating that it’s an ad in the title of the post, making it an illegal advertisement. Later, he posts a promo code in the comments for 20 percent off his hammocks.
• Redditor who works for a potato mailing company admits to being a shill. He shows off his 27 thousand dollars he made in /r/pics (Screenshot because he deleted his posts.) [Here’s the thread.]
• /r/netsec talks about gaming reddit via sockpuppets and how online discourse is (easily) manipulated.
• Reddit is being gamed by professional shills every day. We investigate how widespread the problem of fake comments and fake votes is in our Reddit For Sale follow-up. [11:48]
• Reddit For Sale: How We Bought The Top Spot For $200 [8:27]
• Some websites use shill accounts to spam their competitor’s articles, causing their competitors to become banned 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
• Reddit automation bot: “Run Up To 100 Threads, Checks For Valid Proxy Access & Also To Check If Banned From Site, Keyword Based Submission Finder & Vote Up/Down Capabilities, Mass upvote or downvote Mode…”
• Boostupvotes.com
• Reddit Secrets, buy upvotes
• Reddit Secrets, buy pre-aged and high karma accounts

Studies on social bots and shills

• New Scientist: Sock puppet accounts unmasked by the way they write and post
• Researcher’s algorithm weeds out people using multiple online accounts to spread propaganda – Based on word choice, punctuation and context, the method is able to detect whether one person or multiple people are responsible for the samples.
• Fake product reviews may be pervasive, study finds
• When grassroots activism becomes a commodity – UCLA sociologist investigates ‘astroturf’ campaigns
• Content-Driven Detection of Campaigns in Social Media [PDF]

Additional information

• Shill Confessions and Additional Information (most confessions are unverifiable due to NDA’s and possible trolling.)
• Clinton Campaign used “grass-roots tweeters” to post tweets and graphics at strategic times during the 2016 election campaign.
• At first glance, the Clintonian grass roots seemed to have organically sprouted in anger. But closer inspection yielded traces of Miracle-Gro that led to the 6th floor of a building in Manhattan. “They will put that pressure right on the media outlets in a very intense way,” said Daou, of Shareblue.
• Meme Warfare Center (PDF. Proposal written in 2006)
• WAR.COM: THE INTERNET AND PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS (Proposal written in 2001 by Angela Maria Lungu – Major, US Army.)
• The Gentleman’s Guide To Forum Spies wiki
• Corporate and governmental manipulation of Wikipedia articles
• 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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