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The Atlantic: What Astroturfing Looks Like
webCredibility Rating
4/5
High(4)High quality. Established institution or organization with editorial oversight and accountability.
Rating inherited from publication venue: The Atlantic
Relevant to AI safety discussions around AI-enabled disinformation, synthetic media, and the governance challenges of detecting and countering coordinated inauthentic behavior on social platforms.
Metadata
Importance: 35/100news articlenews
Summary
An Atlantic interview with researcher Renée DiResta, who anticipated the 2016 disinformation crisis, examining how coordinated inauthentic behavior and astroturfing campaigns manipulate public opinion online. The piece explores how synthetic grassroots movements exploit platform algorithms and social dynamics, with warnings about escalating threats to the 2020 election information environment.
Key Points
- •Astroturfing involves creating the illusion of grassroots support through coordinated fake accounts or bot networks to artificially amplify fringe views.
- •Platforms' algorithmic amplification of engagement inadvertently rewards and spreads coordinated inauthentic behavior at scale.
- •Disinformation campaigns in 2016 exploited social media infrastructure in ways researchers had warned about but platforms failed to address.
- •The same manipulation techniques are expected to be more sophisticated and widespread in the 2020 election cycle.
- •Countering these threats requires platform transparency, researcher access to data, and coordinated policy responses.
Review
The article provides a nuanced exploration of public health interventions during pandemics, drawing critical lessons from the 1918 influenza outbreak. It examines how different cities implemented various strategies like social distancing, school closures, and public gathering restrictions, demonstrating that early, aggressive interventions can significantly reduce mortality rates.
Key insights include the complexity of public health decision-making, where interventions like school closures have both potential benefits and unintended consequences. The piece emphasizes that while public health measures can delay disease transmission and prevent healthcare system overwhelm, they are not permanent solutions. The analysis suggests that the primary value of such interventions is not complete prevention, but creating time for healthcare systems to prepare and manage incoming cases more effectively.
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The Complicated Truth About Public Closings - The Atlantic Two days ago—an eon in coronavirus time—the Broadway producer Scott Rudin announced that tickets to some hit shows, including The Book of Mormon and West Side Story , would be available for just $50. “This is an unprecedented opportunity,” he said, “for everyone to see a show that they otherwise might not have had easy and affordable access to.”
In the midst of the great flu pandemic of 1918, a young manager named Harold Edel decided to encourage attendance at his movie theater in the city. It was featuring the new Charlie Chaplin film, Shoulder Arms , and the crowds were so large that Edel extended its run. The manager was so enthusiastic that he took out a full-page ad in the weekly Moving Picture World . While other theaters had been shunned, he wanted to congratulate patrons who “take their lives in their hands to see it.”
Read: What you need to know about the coronavirus
At the bottom of the ad, double-underlined and in a huge font, was the recommendation of the board of health to “AVOID CROWDS.” Edel’s ad continued: “New Yorkers took their life in their hands and Packed the Strand Theatre all week.” Edel, alas, never got to see his ad in print. He died of influenza before it went to press. And on Thursday this week, New York announced that it will be shuttering Broadway.
As I’ve written before , this is no 1918, but the pandemic a century ago left us with several lessons in public-health management and mismanagement, and it provides important information about whether or not banning public gatherings is an effective intervention.
During the terrible pandemic of 1918, all public-health responses were hobbled by the fact that the cause of the outbreak was unclear. Although it would take another 15 years to identify a virus as the culprit, influenza was generally understood to be spread through close contact. Despite this, there was, at least for a while, no ban on large public gatherings. In September, in the midst of both the war effort and the pandemic, the city of Philadelphia held the Liberty Loan Parade. Local newspapers reported that more than 100,000 people thronged the streets. Deaths from the flu quickly spiked. Soon 100 people a day were dying. The Liberty-bonds march had actually liberated the virus.
In contrast, St. Louis canceled its parade and very quickly introduced a number of efforts to promote social distancing. As a result, the excess mortality rate in the city was less than a third the rate in Philadelphia.
Keeping a safe distance from one another takes a lot more work than simply skipping a Broadway show. In 1918, measures included closing schools and churches, staggering business hours to reduce congestion on the transit system, and quarantining households where a member had been diagnosed with influenza. Other restrictions were appropriate for the time that today seem rather quaint. Dance halls were closed, door-to-door sales were banned, and you
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