We are living in an age of widespread cyberturfing by media, internet search, marketing, and political entities. A large percentage of information search and curation is funneled through a few portals under the control of extremely politically-aligned groups.
Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are among the biggest platforms or channels for this abuse, but content creators and advertisers financed by major corporations and other groups with deep pockets and deep connections seek to use the digital environment we all traverse as an influencing tool.
Whereas the term “astroturfing” has been used to describe the use of paid and bussed-in demonstrators and attendees to create an illusion of popular support for a cause or event, cyberturfing is the use of technology and organized content creation/publishing/distribution/curation to create influential illusions about popular opinion, scientific consensus, social science findings, and the like. Infrastructure is created or exploited through pay-to-play, backscratching schemes, or SEO practices leveraging content development among colluding parties.
An internet search using Google will often result in pages of listings promoting ideas contrary to truth, common sense, popular opinion, or established fact. This alone removes the credibility of Google’s search function, upon which it has built its vast empire. The online content industry is likewise tainted insofar as content created is not judged fairly and impartially by the most dominant search engine, with the implication being that individuals and companies worldwide are spending many billions of dollars’ worth of value and labor – many or most of them in good faith – to feed a system that is rigged against them. Any money going to Google through advertisements or other services would appear to keep this rigged system in place.
The feeds and algorithms of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter prioritize content from their preferred voices, and these organizations often wear their biases on their sleeves. The majority of people active on the internet spend time on these platforms and use these search services, with little or no time spent on similar platforms with alternative or opposite biases/priorities. The cyberturfing effect is accomplished by flooding and curating politically prioritized content in search results, “news”, and social media feeds. Featured headlines are often influential themselves, without being read. Imagine the tabloid magazines and newspapers in the checkout aisle you have never bought; you have been (mis)informed and manipulated in your thinking or awareness by the mere presence of those words and images as you pass through the grocery checkout line.
Censorship, deplatforming, and other politically-motivated banning behaviors by Big Tech limit the opinions to which people are exposed, and this chilling effect often sets the default of perceived allowable opinion both online and offline.
Retailers and commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay have enacted absurd new rules that remove items deemed “politically incorrect” from their sites, making profitability and distribution of ideas much more difficult. These thoughts and cultural items are practically removed from the public square, with dire implications for future discourse and culture if wiser minds do not reverse the course.
These cyberturfing and censorious behaviors among content platforms are increasingly being combined with acts by website hosting services, credit card payment processors, and banking services to weaken the economic backbone of the voices the guilty parties aim to drown out or silence.
Cyberturfing is a serious threat to the health of our society, and that is why it needs to be identified and understood at a popular level. Alt-tech alternatives to the mainline social media and search companies can serve as a part of the solution, but awareness and intentional social and economic behavior needs to be a part of our conscious effort to retain truth and sanity in our communications and our communities.
