Antiturfer

Many powerful and rich organisations have business dealings they'd rather keep secret, often illegal dealings. They will seek to derail, disrupt and slander anyone who dares expose those dealings. They will of course act through proxies. After reading this post tonight, it gave me an idea of something we've been lacking as a module / plug-in for software like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, an anti-astroturfer module. First let's look at the state of play between the astroturfer and the website administrator.

The site admin can moderate the comments they receive as most do. This is a genuine method to prevent their site from being flooded with spam comments to delete when they get the chance, it's easier to keep the site clean by moderating. It can be abused too, where a comment disagreeing with the site admin is deleted and only a one sided conversation is seen. This is often an accusation made by the astroturfers if their comment does not appear, and for the most part it's as bogus as the rest of their claims.

Astroturfers also claim some private conversation has been taking place that they're not sharing with the public. The point is to sow mistrust. The longer it goes on, the more they will try to use it to prove some malicious intent. In most cases it's also as fictional as their other claims, but like anything else, if it's private, it "may" be true.

Astroturfers also hide behind anonymous posts, protected in the belief that only the site administrator can see the IP address the comment has come from, if it's made public, the astroturfer then claims it's been tampered with to discredit them. In addition the accusations of being a bully to those who don't agree with the site admin are thrown about.

Remember that the goal of the astroturfer is to derail the site and it's message. They play to the peanut gallery who consume stuff in summaries and conclusions. They seek to draw the site admin's time and attention onto dealing with them, in the hopes that something they say will provoke an emotional response, which they then take out of context to further demonise.

In other words, if the site admin lets comments through unmoderated, in addition to a flood of spam, they will get a flood of astroturfers all piling in with the same accusations, linking to each other as "proof" of their accusations. If they moderate to keep the spammers out but let the astroturfers comments through the same effect can happen. If they respond to each accusation as it happens, they are constantly diverted and can't get anything done. If the site admin deletes the more aggressive astroturfer posts they are accused of spinning a partial story.

All of these approaches are winners for the astroturfers, not the site admins. This is where the Antiturfer module / plugin comes in. This is how it works.

The comment approval part of Drupal / WordPress etc has an additional two options, in addition to "publish" "edit  "unpublish" etc. It has "known astroturfer" and "suspected astroturfer". Each of these has various profile settings attached to them.

The idea is that you can archive the post with a click and either publish it or not. It archives the IP address etc along with a lookup on that IP address at that time. You will have the option to flag that user or IP block so that it detects new comments without you having to manually detect it. You will have the option to have the software itself automatically mark someone in that range as either "suspected astroturfer" or "known astroturfer".

You will also have the ability to send each comment to a page devoted to their attempts, like the PirateBay's legal threats page. This page could be private or public, it could optionally include the comment into the post where it was submitted, or only the page of shame. The page would also be able to automatically post IP / lookup info with each comment too.

You'd need some way to import an email into that same filter and include it, complete with full headers intact to the page of shame. Each page of shame could have a small profile section where the lookup fills in some of the corporate info behind who owns the IP in question, allowing you to fill in additional detail like known partners etc.

You could have a separate list of known "perception management" "public relations" (and other astroturfer euphemisms) companies along the lines of an adblock list, with their IP ranges so a comment is filtered through that list automatically. All of this would need to be developed and maintained in an open and transparent manor, to make the accusations of the astroturfers even more hollow. I suspect the hosts of such lists would be flooded by DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) requests from the companies involved, and their employers so it'd need to be mirrored in various jurisdictions.

Think of it as a permanent public record you can point the FTC to in your complaint email. The main thing astroturfers are afraid of is public exposure. They rely on pretending to be one of the crowd that you don't notice, working from the shadows. Their actions are illegal, immoral and unethical. They only do it where they detect they can get away with it. They will not do it in places that get them caught and their employers in legal and regulatory trouble.

I am not a developer, I can't create this module but I'd love to see someone explore the idea and create a FOSS module capable of being easily ported to every web platform. Perhaps an additional feature to have all of these pages of shame send their findings back to a larger aggregation site would be effective too, allowing regulators like the FTC to see just how widespread and deliberate these campaigns are, before they call on the employer company CEO's to answer questions.