A story about a proposed rule ends with a quote. Not from a politician, not from a company — from a group. "Consumers for Fair Access." "The Alliance for Affordable Energy." "Citizens for a Sound Economy." Something with a flag-adjacent name and a spokesperson who sounds reasonable and slightly tired, the way real people sound. * You read the quote as what it looks like: ordinary people, organized. That is the entire product. The names are chosen so that you will read them exactly that way, and the quote is offered to reporters for free, on deadline, already polished. * That is astroturfing, and once you can see it you cannot stop seeing it. * ### Where the word comes from * AstroTurf is a brand of fake grass. The political meaning was coined in 1985 by Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, who noticed that the mountain of "citizen" letters he was getting about insurance legislation had all come from insurers. His line — that a fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grass roots and AstroTurf — is the whole concept in one sentence. * The definition is narrow and worth keeping narrow: **astroturfing is a campaign secretly funded and directed by a corporate, political or state interest, deliberately dressed up as spontaneous public opinion.** Not "a group I disagree with." Not "a group with money." The two required ingredients are *hidden sponsor* and *manufactured spontaneity*. Take either one away and you just have lobbying, which is legal, disclosed, and boring. * ### Exhibit A: the smokers who were mostly a PR firm * In 1993 the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, working for Philip Morris, created the National Smokers Alliance — a group for smokers angry about smoking bans, indoor-air laws and cigarette taxes. According to the tobacco industry documents catalogued by SourceWatch and by the University of Bath's Tobacco Tactics project, Philip Morris seeded it with roughly $4 million, the Alliance's president was a Burson-Marsteller vice president, and other executives from the firm ran it from the inside. By 1995 it claimed around 300,000 members, recruited through full-page ads and telemarketing. * Read that back. A tobacco company paid a PR firm to build a membership organization, staffed it with the PR firm's own executives, and then that organization appeared in news coverage as *smokers*, pushing back against *the government*. Every element of the sentence was technically true. The subject of the sentence was fake. * ### Exhibit B: 18 million people who did not exist * The modern version does not need members at all. It needs volume. * When the FCC moved to repeal net neutrality in 2017, its public comment docket received more than 22 million comments — reported at the time, reasonably, as an extraordinary outpouring of public interest. In May 2021 the New York Attorney General's office published the results of a multi-year investigation into what those comments actually were. * The findings, from the AG's own report: * — **Nearly 18 million of the 22 million comments were fake.** * — More than **8.5 million** were submitted using the identities of **real Americans who never wrote them**, generated by a campaign funded by the broadband industry, which spent about **$4.2 million** on it. The stated goal in the documents investigators obtained was to manufacture the appearance of "widespread grassroots support" for repeal. * — The same operation produced more than **500,000 fake letters to Congress**. * — The lead generators hired to sign consumers up mostly did not bother signing anyone up. They lured people with prizes and freebies, then fabricated the responses. * — And the other side was not clean either: a **19-year-old college student**, working alone with automated software, submitted **9.3 million** fake pro-net-neutrality comments under invented identities. * Three of the lead generators — Fluent, React2Media and Opt-Intelligence — settled with New York for a combined **$4.4 million** ($3.7 million, $550,000 and $150,000 respectively). Attorney General Letitia James said Americans' voices were "being drowned out" by masses of fake comments sent to the government. * Now hold the two facts next to each other. The 22-million figure was real news, reported by real outlets, and it was true — that many comments were filed. The story it implied, the one every reader took away, was false. Nobody lied to the press. The press was handed a number and the number did the lying. * ### How it gets into a news story * Astroturf groups do not sneak into coverage. They are **invited**, because they make a reporter's day easier. The standard route: * **1. The neutral name.** Nothing that names the industry. "Families," "citizens," "consumers," "jobs," "affordable," "choice." A name that pre-writes the reporter's framing. * **2. The always-available spokesperson.** The company's own CEO takes four days to clear a comment through legal. The group answers in nine minutes with a usable line. Guess who ends up in the story. * **3. The commissioned poll.** A survey the group paid for, released as a finding. It becomes "a new poll shows," and the sponsor disappears somewhere between the press release and paragraph six. * **4. The letters and comments.** Regulatory dockets, local newspaper letters pages, council submissions — venues where volume is treated as evidence of feeling. * **5. The real local face.** The most effective version isn't fake at all: a genuine small-business owner, sincerely worried, whose op-ed was drafted for them and whose flight was paid for. Everything in the story checks out. The origin never comes up. * ### Checking one in about a minute * You do not need a newsroom. You need a search bar and a suspicious streak. * **Search the group's name plus "funded by" or "backed by."** Journalists and researchers have usually done this already for anything significant. * **Look for a past.** A real movement has a history — old meeting notes, a founding fight, members who complain about each other publicly. An astroturf group has a launch date, a logo, and a website that appeared the same month the bill did. Check when the domain was registered. * **Check the address.** Groups that share a suite number with a lobbying or PR firm are telling you something for free. * **Look at what happens after the vote.** Real organizations lose a fight and keep going, because the thing they care about is still there. Campaign shells evaporate. If a group's last post is dated three weeks after the bill died, it was a tool, not a movement. * **Read what the reporter says about funding.** Good coverage names the backers, or says plainly that the group declined to disclose them. That refusal-line is a gift — it is the reporter telling you what they could not confirm. * ### The trap in the other direction * Here is where this goes wrong, and it goes wrong constantly online: "astroturf" has become an all-purpose insult for any movement someone dislikes. Tenants organizing against a landlord, workers walking out, parents at a school board meeting — all of them get accused of being paid, because accusing them is cheaper than answering them. * So keep the burden of proof where it belongs. The claim "this is astroturf" requires the same thing as any other claim: **evidence of who is paying and who is directing.** Filings, documents, an investigation, a reporter who followed the money. Vibes about a group's professional-looking website are not evidence — plenty of genuine campaigns are well run, and plenty of grassroots groups get grants without being anyone's puppet. * Astroturfing is a fact about **funding and control**, not about how sincere the people in the photo look. Most of them usually are sincere. That's what makes it work. * ### The one habit worth keeping * When a story quotes a group you have never heard of, do not ask whether they seem reasonable. They will. That's the job. Ask one question instead: **who pays for this, and would the group still exist next year if that money stopped?** * If the article does not tell you, that is not a small gap. It is the part of the story that was outsourced — and the reason someone spent $4.2 million making sure it read like your neighbours.