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No, it's a guy in Florida who went through and parked a bunch of domains with the same pattern. Maybe because he believed in the cause, and maybe because he wa
by bpodgursky 7y ago
No, it's a guy in Florida who went through and parked a bunch of domains with the same pattern. Maybe because he believed in the cause, and maybe because he wanted to make a few quick bucks.
"Astroturfing" would be when paid shills or robots spam FCC comment boards. It's not astroturfing when thousands of genuine supporters of a cause show up at a protest, whether or not there is coordination (surprise, all protests need coordination).
Trying to turn this into a sinister conspiracy -- and not genuine discontent -- is a cheap mental shortcut which lets you discount that a lot of people feel differently than you.
- phakding 7y agoDid you even read the links I posted?
- recursive 7y agoYour reddit link includes photos of real people at a demonstration. Astro-turfing wouldn't produce that, unless they were paid actors.
- x86_64Ubuntu 7y agoNo. They aren't going to read the links because they fall on the side of the protesters and astro-turfers ideologically.
- bpodgursky 7y agoI read the links, and like I said in the original comment, I think it's very disingenuous to equate "national political organization with real human supporters" with "artificial or paid shills" You could use that logic to brand the ACLU or other civil rights organizations "astroturfers", because they are trying to coordinate or bootstrap local movements. Do you think that Black Lives Matter protests have to independently, randomly coalesce in cities for them to be real movements? Obviously not. Social change is hard, and claiming "oh, but there's someone out-of-state helping them organize" is just a cheap way to invalidate any protest you don't like. It's no better than Putin branding all NGOs as "foreign agents", to trash any civil society the Kremlin doesn't like. We can do better.
- ThePowerOfFuet 7y agoRead the Krebs link. Follow the Florida guy's phone number...
- kds3 7y agoFlorida guy's phone number is registered in Jacksonville, FL (same with WHOIS records) [0]. Brian probably made a mistake, happens to everyone. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931919
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]