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My hot take is that a medium like Wikipedia with its naïve penchant for sourcing and attribution is not the best place for astro-turfing and, ironically, un-Cor
by tanderson92 10y ago
My hot take is that a medium like Wikipedia with its naïve penchant for sourcing and attribution is not the best place for astro-turfing and, ironically, un-Correcting The Record.
Selective sourcing and misdirection is easier on twitter than on a collaborative resource like Wikipedia.
- Torgo 10y agoThere are ways to do it, and it is done regularly. If you have a badtruth that you want to share, you don't put it in the main article. You put it in a related article where it mentions the subject tangentially. It can fly under the radar of ideologues for a long time that way. Honestly though, this isn't an astroturfing move as much as it's a defense against the people that camp on articles removing anything that they think makes whatever their political position is look bad.
- huac 10y agoWikipedians are often wrong, but have learned to be more vigilant regarding claims about public officials. Selective sourcing and misdirection are even easier when you own the "media" outlet. Brock's takeover of Blue Nation Review is a shameless reshaping of liberal media to fit the Clinton agenda - a super PAC aligned with a candidate owning a "news" source. It's probably a smart political move this election, but along with the $1M Correct the Record push for online messaging, shows how Clinton can't gather the kind of young grassroots support that Obama and Sanders could.
- tanderson92 10y agoThe "organic" "cross-pollination" is perhaps the most amusing. For example, the non-organic Brock-funded "Bros 4 Hillary" group receives coverage in the Blue Nation Review, and then lauds its accomplishments in grass-roots organizing. Enough to be published even! It's nearly Kafkaesque.