Astroturf
A campaign manufactured to look like a spontaneous grassroots movement: the letters, calls, petitions, reviews, or accounts that appear to come from ordinary people and are organized and paid for by an interested party. Named after the artificial grass.
The coinage is usually credited to Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, who in 1985 described a flood of near-identical letters on insurance legislation as "generated mail" and said he could tell the difference between grass roots and AstroTurf. The practice is older than the word. Public relations firms had been organizing "spontaneous" letter-writing campaigns, citizens' committees, and marches since the 1920s, and Edward Bernays described the method in his own books.
Astroturf works because social proof is persuasive and because legislators, editors, and platforms all treat the volume of apparently independent voices as a measure of public feeling. If the voices can be manufactured, the measure can be moved. The modern forms are the review farm, the sock-puppet network, the front group with a civic-sounding name, and the comment campaign on a regulatory docket, where millions of submissions have on occasion turned out to come from a handful of senders.
The technique page on Astroturfing gives the full treatment. The term is also used loosely of any political organizing that has professional backing, which blurs it; the test is concealment. A union mobilizing its members is grass roots. A company mobilizing its employees under a name that hides the company is astroturf.
Sources
- Walker, Edward T. Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1107619012
- Bernays, Edward L. Propaganda. New York: Horace Liveright, 1928.