Astroturfing vs Front groups
What is the difference, when does each apply, and can both be at work at once.
Astroturfing
Manufacturing the appearance of spontaneous public support for a position, through paid letters, staged demonstrations, or fabricated accounts, so that an interested party's campaign looks like a movement.
Front groups
An organization created or funded by an interested party to speak in public under a neutral or civic name, so that the party's message arrives with someone else's credibility.
The differences
| Astroturfing | Front groups | |
|---|---|---|
| What is faked | The crowd: many voices that appear independent and are organized or paid. | The organization: a body with a civic or expert name that speaks for a hidden interest. |
| Shape | Horizontal. Letters, reviews, accounts, comments, marchers. | Vertical. One named institute, coalition, or committee with a logo and a spokesperson. |
| What it borrows | Social proof: "ordinary people feel this way". | Authority: "an independent body has concluded this". |
| Classic case | The 1985 "generated mail" on insurance legislation that gave the practice its name. | The tobacco industry's research council of the 1950s, presented as independent science. |
| The counter-move | Look for sameness: identical phrasing, synchronised timing, new accounts. | Look for the funder: who pays, who sits on the board, who writes the reports. |
| The tell | Too many people saying the same thing in the same words. | A name that sounds like a university and an address that is a law firm. |
A regulator's public comment period receives two million submissions opposing a rule. Analysis finds that most use one of a handful of templates and that many are attributed to people who never sent them.
"Citizens for Sensible Energy Policy" publishes reports and testifies to legislators against a conservation measure. Its funding comes from a single utility company, which is not named on its website.
Often, because they serve each other. A front group needs a crowd behind it to look like a movement, and an astroturf campaign needs an organization to give it a name and a spokesperson. The combination is the standard product of the public affairs industry. The two questions to ask are separate, though: are these voices real, and is this organization what it says it is.