Astroturf Libertarians are the Real Threat to Internet Democracy

They are the online equivalent of enclosure riots: the rick-burning, fence-toppling protests by English peasants losing their rights to the land. When MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Amazon tried to shut WikiLeaks out of the cyber-commons, an army of hackers responded by trying to smash their way into these great estates and pull down their fences. In the WikiLeaks punch-up the commoners appear to have the upper hand. But it's just one battle. There's a wider cyberwar being fought, of which you hear much less. And in most cases the landlords, with the help of a mercenary army, are winning.

I'm not talking here about threats to net neutrality and the danger of a two-tier internet developing, though these are real. I'm talking about the daily attempts to control and influence content in the interests of the state and corporations: attempts in which money talks.

The weapon used by both state and corporate players is a technique known as astroturfing. An astroturf campaign is one that mimics spontaneous grassroots mobilisations but which has in reality been organised. Anyone writing a comment piece in Mandarin critical of the Chinese government, for instance, is likely to be bombarded with abuse by people purporting to be ordinary citizens, upset by the slurs against their country.

But many of them aren't upset: they are members of the 50 Cent Party, so-called because one Chinese government agency pays five mao (half a yuan) for every post its tame commenters write. Teams of these sock-puppets are hired by party leaders to drown out critical voices and derail intelligent debates.

I first came across online astroturfing in 2002, when the investigators Andy Rowell and Jonathan Matthews looked into a series of comments made by two people calling themselves Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek. They had launched ferocious attacks, across several internet forums, against a scientist whose research suggested that Mexican corn had been widely contaminated by GM pollen.

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Save American Democracy, or What's Left of It

This is the first election after the Citizens United decision which gave corporations complete freedom to spend as much money as they want to influence the outcome of elections.

Citizens beware.  Citizens get active.  Citizens get organized. Our fragile democracy is at grave risk.

We've seen in Obama's time in office (and before) how corporations dominate Washington, DC.  The health care "reform" turned out to be a re-enforcement of the insurance-company-dominated health care industry.  And finance reform had to get the approval of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve before moving forward. Corporate welfare to the weapons, coal, nuclear and oil industries have continued or even grown under Obama. The housing crisis, which should have ended with the bailout of Wall Street, is getting worse, with record foreclosures last month. But that is not enough for the oligarchs who control government through concentrated corporate power.  They want more, and they are using massive spending on elections to get it.

A coalition of organizations has come together to expose groups spending hundreds of millions on the mid-term elections in secret, unlimited donations that avoid campaign finance laws.


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