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Your search for “astroturfing” produced “18” results
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—>Front groups for cable and satellite companies pretending to represent the interest of sports fans? Mysterious "sources" and leaks? This is nothing new to Consumerist readers, but our estranged siblings at Deadspin have some great information on a lobbying and PR war between thinly disguised groups working on behalf of DirectTV and the big cable companies, and their battle over fans and fees. Or is it? More »
—>Everyone likes to hate on spammers, but they're basically the houseflies of the Internet. Far more insidious and damaging are astroturfers and front groups—those corporate-funded, agenda-pushing people who don't disclose who they're really working for while they participate in online culture and the media. The Center for Media and Democracy has put together a list of tips to help you identify them from real grassroots movements, while Free Press has created a widget that reveals front groups for five large companies you frequently see on Consumerist. More »
—>Over a year ago, we wrote about Lifestyle Lift and its attempts to astroturf a customer review website (while simultaneously suing that website for trademark infringement, naturally). But then they caught the attention of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office, and now they've agreed to pay $300,000 and will stop publishing fake reviews online. More »
—>Instead of paying outsiders to give their products fake positive reviews on Amazon product pages like Belkin and other companies, DeLonghi cut out the middleman. Their communications manager, Tara Carpenter, simply went on Amazon and gave a variety of DeLonghi products five-star rave reviews herself. More »
—>Previously: Amazon Deletes Reviews That Mention Pay For Play Review Schemes More »
—>The super fantastic Super Bowl ad liveblog kicks off now! Click this post's title to go inside... More »
—>With over 150,000 fans, Ticketmaster's Facebook page is one of the most popular. Too bad most of its friends' profiles are fake. More »
An astroturfing group started by chemical supergiant Monsanto is trying to stop the spread of milk that's free of bovine synthetic growth hormone. They say they're trying to defend farmer's rights but they can't fool us, we know they really just want to make the future safe for large breasts. [NYT] More »
60 minutes profiled him in a segment called "Meet Dr. Evil." You could watch that, or you could watch Stephen Colbert. Yeah, we thought so. Enjoy. More »
—>According to Wired, Facebook users have hijacked Walmart's dorm decoration discussion page, choosing instead to discuss the way Walmart "destroys communities and prevents unionization." Oh, my! More »
—>When will companies learn that astroturfing is lame? Never! More »
The Edelman team assigned to Wal-Mart, I learned, is divided into three groups: "promote," "response," and "pressure." The Jobs and Opportunity Zones notion came from the promotions team. The response-team members—veterans of political campaigns—are supposed to quickly counter criticism in the press or on the Web. The pressure group works on opposition research, focussing on the unions and the press. More »
Michael Harrison's experienced an update of the classic 'Yellow Pages' prank—where someone signs a target up for every magazine subscription, free credit card, and food delivery person in as small a window as possible—for posting negative comments about a company on his blog. He suspects the dozens of phone calls, spam, and junk mail he received came as recompense for a negative post about BatteryGeek.net's service based on the IP history of posters on various trackbacks and blogs. More »
—>We're not really in a position to mock people slavishly devoted to unhealthy obsessions with consumer brands. (It took us three Star Wars prequels to finally turn our anger to hatred.) But we have to admit to cocking our middle knuckle up in the traditional nougie-giving position before we realized that soda pop fans at SaveSurge.org were our people.
And the citrus flavor was just AWESOME... I fell in love. I used every chance I got to buy it. My school had a vending machine that contained SURGE... I ended up spending the majority of my lunch money buying SURGE from that machine. I talked my mom into supporting my SURGE habit by buying two liters of the wonderful citrus soda for me to enjoy once I got home. It was rare that someone saw me without a two liter or can of SURGE grasped snugly in my hand.Bear in mind, this isn't regular astroturfing (we think), because Surge doesn't exist anymore. More »
