Tipster: MPAA astroturf group is buying signatures to beef up its numbers
CreativeAmerica is an astroturf group financed by the MPAA that pretends to represent everyday folks who want to see further-reaching, stricter copyrights, and it just happens to be run by a bunch of...
View ArticleHoax campus advertisement offers students €100 to pretend to be pro-ACTA...
@jimmy_pirat (a Twitter account with only one post) snapped a blurrycam picture of a campus employment ad that sought students to pretend to be pro-ACTA and hold up photogenic signs, paying €100 for...
View ArticleHomophobic Chick-Fil-A in a chickeny shitstorm
Homophobic chicken-slingers Chick-Fil-A are reeling in a tempest of bad publicity. First the Jim Henson company yanked its toys from its stores, then the mayor of Boston told it that it should set up...
View ArticleWhere does Assad's online army come from?
Syria's brutal Assad regime has damned few allies left in the world, but one of them, Russia, is governed by a dirty-tricking ruling elite who've made a science out of manipulating Internet opinion....
View ArticleFox News's astroturfers who defend the network online with armies of fake...
In his new book Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires, NPR's David Folkenflik details how Fox News employees maintain dozens (and, in at least one case, over 100) different message-board...
View ArticleWikimedia sends legal threat to WikiPR over sockpuppetry and meatpuppetry
Wikimedia, the nonprofit that oversees the Wikipedia project, has sent a cease-and-desist letter to WikiPR, an astroturfing company that pays people to distort Wikipedia entries on behalf of clients...
View Article$1B/year climate denial network exposed
In Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations, a scholarly article published in the current Climatic Change , Drexel...
View ArticleRussia's army of paid astroturfers message-bomb western coverage of Ukraine
A set of documents leaked by a group identifying itself as Russian hackers purports to be training materials for Russian psyops agents who were paid to make favorable comments about Russia's position...
View ArticleBig Cable fronts fake anti-Net-Neutrality group whose "members" never joined
Broadband For America is an anti-Net Neutrality group entirely funded by the National Cable and Telecom Association -- Big Cable's lobbying front, that has represented itself to the FCC as a...
View ArticleSeattle paid $17.5K to "manage" online rep of public utility CEO
The City of Seattle paid $17,500 to Brand.com to enhance the "online reputation" of City Light, its public utility, and Chief Executive Officer Jorge Carrasco, asking them to "lessen the prevalence of...
View ArticleKoch-affiliated astroturfers call Net Neutrality "Marxist"
American Commitment, a Koch-brothers-associated fake grassroots group whose previous campaigns include support for Keystone XL and the coal industry, has been circulating an alarmist petition against...
View ArticleRespected medical journal changes hands, starts publishing junk science for hire
Experimental & Clinical Cardiology published for 17 years out of Oshawa, ON, but is now owned by shadowy figures in Switzerland, whose payments are processed through Turks and Caicos, and they'll...
View ArticleWho is Gamergate? Analysis of 316K tweets
Waxy took a deep three-day sample of #Gamergate-tagged tweets and did some great analysis to uncover the composition and patterns of participants on both sides of the debate. (more…)
View ArticleSecret recording of corporate lobbyist is a dirty-tricks playbook
Richard Berman -- called "Dr Evil" by both friends and enemies -- laid out the dirty tricks (PDF) needed to defeat environmental groups and labor activists to a Western Energy Alliance summit, and was...
View ArticleLeaked docs detail Big Oil and Big PR's plans for a opinion-manipulation...
The leaked slides were prepared by Edelman, the largest PR company in the world, at the behest of Transcanada, and they constitute a blueprint for tracking and influencing platform that spies on its...
View ArticleComcast ghost-wrote politicians' letters in support of Time Warner Cable merger
Letters sent to the FCC in favor of Comcast's proposed Time Warner Cable merger came from Mayor Jere Wood of Roswell, GA; Councilor Todd Wodraska of Jupiter, FL; Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown...
View ArticleImaginary ISIS attack on Louisiana and the twitterbots who loved it
Gilad Lotan has spotted some pretty sophisticated fake-news generation, possibly from Russia, and possibly related to my weird, larval twitterbots, aimed at convincing you that ISIS had blown up a...
View ArticleRussia's troll factory
An outstanding expose of Internet Research Agency, a St Petersburg, Russia-based army of trolls for hire who post pro-Kremlin messages to comment forums all day. (more…)
View ArticleGCHQ psychological operations squad targeted Britons for manipulation
The once-secretive, now-notorious Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group ran its online propaganda and manipulation operations at home as well as abroad. (more…)
View ArticleGovernment-run egg board waged high-price, secret PSYOPS war on vegan...
The American Egg Board's members are appointed by the FDA, and it was they who funded a secrets, deceptive smear campaign against startup Hampton Creek's vegan egg replacement. (more…)
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