Danger of Astroturfing

[YSianiFlewog]

So we've just had an election in Wales, and some of the tactics used by Reform are quite frankly, scary. They have been taking over groups on social media and completety highjacking them.

Will Hayward a journalist working in Wales can explain better than me -

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1FfKihyaRc/

This is definitely something to be aware of before the General election.

I know what it means in the theoretical way
I will have to look out for Reform doing it because I can't read that article without Facebook, shame as it sounds interesting

@WatermelonSalad1 This is the text, but the video shows examples of community social groups that were taken over temporary up to the election. Quite strange.

"Well placed sources within Reform UK have indicated to us that they intend to employ a technique known as “astroturfing”.

If you haven’t heard of astroturfing, it is a concerted attempt to create the impression of widespread grassroots support or opposition to a party or policy when in fact it doesn’t exist.

Examples include multiple online identities bombarding social media pages or fake pressure groups being constructed to mislead the public into believing that a particular position has significant widespread support.

We saw this tactic used on several large Welsh Facebook groups over the election.

We approached Reform UK for comment on this and the did not reply.

This is something we are going to be covering going forward"

Reform, previously The Brexit Party, run by Nigel Farage who ran exactly this sort of shitty propaganda during the Brexit referendum. No surprise the same tactics are still being deployed.

Yup. I think it can be seen here on MN too. Their tactic is to get accusations of being "thick" going. Intentional spelling mistakes, walls of text with no punctuations. It all seems to be designed to get the "thick" flowing.

Then that takes over the conversation. Them and us stuff. That anyone not with them is some sort of "intellectual elite".

A tried and tested method of building a cult of personality.

The irony of complaining about unethical and possibly unlawful political manipulation ON FACEBOOK... 😑