How astroturfing tactics are eroding journalism

From fake personas on social media to media literacy movements and Wikipedia, information manipulation and censorship are on the rise in a big way.

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Full transcript:

Sharyl Attkisson:

Hi, everybody. Sharyl Attkisson here. Welcome to another edition of the Sharyl Attkisson podcast on justthenews.com, a digital news site dedicated to facts not spin and reporting on under reported stories and views that cut across the grain. I hope you'll subscribe to this podcast and to all the just the news podcasts John Solomon reports and the pods, honest truth.

Sharyl Attkisson:

Today, I'm going to talk about government censorship and journalism. I think you'll find this a very eyeopening, reality check. A reminder that you can pre order my new book, Slanted, How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism. It'll be out in late November. It's a great Christmas gift for yourself or someone who's interested in this subject matter and it supports independent journalism. A portion of the proceeds will go to good journalism charities as always. You can pre order Slanted at Amazon or anywhere.

Sharyl Attkisson:

Now, the best way I can summarize what I think has happened to journalism today and I've learned a lot from my travels throughout Europe and even attending a global journalism conference in Russia. This is all a global trend. What you see and read on the news is now largely what special interest corporations and political interests want you to see rather than from original news gathering by reporters. The secret tactics that many use to manipulate are called in general terms, AstroTurf as in fake grassroots. And they use these tactics to manipulate the public, reporters and the news.

Sharyl Attkisson:

Plainly speaking, you've probably heard the term, but I think of AstroTurf is when political people, companies, or other special interests who make money and gain power, if you think a certain way, when they disguise themselves and do things often online on the internet to convince you of something sometimes in very subtle ways. So they don't say, "Vote for this guy." Or "Buy this product." Because that's too obvious. Instead, they may push out comments on social media or pay so called experts to write things that make you think about issues in a way that would cause you to vote for the guy they want, or maybe make you think you have a problem so that you buy their product to fix it. Or maybe they bully you into thinking you shouldn't share your views.

Sharyl Attkisson:

AstroTurfers, they write blogs, they publish ads, they write letters to the editor. They secretly pay people to post comments online and they do all of it to try to fool you into thinking a lot of real people feel a certain way and so you should too. The whole point of AstroTurf is to try to give the impression that there's widespread support for or against something when there's not. AstroTurf seeks to manipulate you into changing your opinion by making you feel as if you're an outlier like you're the weirdo if you feel a certain way when you're not.

Sharyl Attkisson:

So I sort of think of it as the online version of high school peer pressure, but the people bullying you in this case are doing it secretly. They're companies, government, special interests. They're pressuring you in all kinds of tricky ways because they ultimately make money or gain power if you feel a certain way or support their ideas.

Sharyl Attkisson:

So one of the first categories of AstroTurf I want to address is fake science. And people don't think about this. You tend to hear the word science and say, "Well, that must be true." And it's used in this propagandist way a lot of times on the news and on the internet these days. So I'm talking about peer reviewed published studies. According to the editor in chief of the prestigious British journal Lancet and according to the former editor of the new England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell, who I've interviewed for full measure, they say most of the literature and published journals where many of our doctors get most of their information where journalists are told medical truth can be found, most of the literature is not to be believed.

Sharyl Attkisson:

Think of the implications. The editors of the journals themselves are saying most of the literature, including their own publications is not to be believed. The information they say is now being widely manipulated by medical interests and pharmaceutical companies to sell products or controversialize certain ideas that question the safety of their products to push certain therapies or discredit others. And this is part of the reason why Dr. Angel says she left the new England Journal of Medicine.

Sharyl Attkisson:

Another example of AstroTurf, a lot of you know about this one is Wikipedia. It's built as the encyclopedia that anybody can edit, but it is actually an AstroTurfers dream come true. Anonymous Wikipedia editors who are actually working on behalf of companies or political people or whomever. They control pages. They forbid or reverse edits that go against what it is they want you to believe. They learned at the beginning of Wikipedia how to use its own rules against you and me, because the way it works, a lot of volunteer Wikipedia editors are not really ordinary people like you and me. The volunteer Wikipedia editors who have edited the longest and made the most edits over time are granted the most editing power in Wikipedia's hierarchy.

Sharyl Attkisson:

So AstroTurf is in PR companies and others who want to manipulate information, they figured that out years ago. They became Wikipedia volunteer editors sometimes as a group of people working under one name. Sometimes one person working under one pseudonym and they made tons of edits so that they've now worked their way to the top of the Wikipedia volunteer editing food chain. They can be in control of any Wikipedia page they want to control by virtue of the power they have through having made so many edits for so long over the years.

Sharyl Attkisson:

So try editing factual information that they do not want onto one of the controlled pages, and the controlling editors who watch the page ferociously will revert your edit away like it never even happened sometimes within minutes of you making the edit. Now, of course, this isn't a big issue if you're talking about pages that catalog pop culture or every episode of the walking dead. There's a lot of perfectly accurate information on Wikipedia, but that's, what's so confusing because it's mixed in the propaganda and the control. It is an issue for topics that these agenda editors try to control or people they want to smear and discredit, even reporters because the people they want to smear and discredit have ideas they don't want you to hear or facts that they don't want you to believe. So these agenda editors skew and delete information on Wikipedia and they do it in blatant violation of Wikipedia's own established policies, but they can get away with it without punishment because of the way Wikipedia works. And they always remain superior to anybody else in the editing chain.

Sharyl Attkisson:

And those of us who believe anyone can edit Wikipedia, you get a harsh dose of reality when you try to put a footnoted factual citation on Wikipedia that's contrary to what they want people to think. There was the book author I've talked about named Phillip Roth. This is just sort of a funny example of what I'm talking about. He saw a major fact error in his Wikipedia biography about one of his novels and he tried to correct the fact error over and over. He was the one with the most information on his own thinking behind the novel, they had misattributed the inspiration for one of his characters, but he only weirdly one time after another, had others on Wikipedia, keep putting the error back in.

Sharyl Attkisson:

So he finally found a way to contact somebody at Wikipedia, no easy task. I know this firsthand. And they told him he was not considered to be a credible source on himself and that that's why they changed the inspiration for the character in one of his books. They kept changing it back because he didn't know himself best and was not considered by Wikipedia to be a credible source.

Sharyl Attkisson:

Now on a more serious note, Wikipedia officials and editors have gotten caught selling their services to use their editing control to edit pages on behalf of paid publicity seeking clients and companies. This is the giveaway. One Wikipedia official posted an ad that advertised "A positive Wikipedia article is invaluable, guaranteed to be a top three Google hit." Also on Wikipedia, powerful drug companies have gotten caught trolling specific pages as volunteer editors to promote sometimes false information. Maybe they don't want side effects about their own medicines revealed or in one case, a drug company got caught editing in bad stuff about another drug company on their Wikipedia page.

Sharyl Attkisson:

There are definitely pharmaceutical interests controlling my biography trying to make it look as though falsely I'm anti-vaccine. And every time someone tries to point out that my vaccine autism reporting has been cited positively in the new England Journal of Medicine, a scientific citation. Well, that gets immediately erased on Wikipedia by the agenda editors watching my biography. And so all of this so that when you search topics and people online, you're more likely to get these special interests version of the truth and nothing else.

Sharyl Attkisson:

When I studied the phenomenon for The Smear, the second book that I wrote, I found myself thinking about the Truman show, that 1998 movie, which was, if you haven't been around long enough, a great movie before we had the proliferation of all these reality shows. The Truman show was a dark comedy about, I think what would have been the first reality show, an orphan named Truman Burbank who doesn't know it, but he's being raised by a corporation in a simulated reality that's being broadcast, unbeknownst to him as a TV show around the world. And I kind of think that's how I see our daily lives being manipulated.

Sharyl Attkisson:

As we use our computer or research online or take part in social media, we're constantly surrounded by artificial realities by design that aren't what they seem. And as I have spoken of before, a person who works in this industry, I call the smear industry that manipulates what we see and read. I interviewed him for The Smear and he said, people don't realize that nothing happens by accident when they go about their daily lives it's like a movie. This is what he said, "There's no scene that isn't meant to be there. There's no dialogue that's random. People in companies spend a lot of money to place these ideas before you to achieve an objective and they're willing to make any expense to achieve it."

Sharyl Attkisson:

So a couple of other examples of how information is shaped online. There are nonprofit groups and so-called charities. Most often I've found there's more than meets the eye. These are inevitably funded. In many instances are controlled by some interests trying to manipulate your opinion sometimes in a sneaky way. And they've learned that there's very little regulation and oversight in our system of nonprofits and charities, so they can use them in this way to manipulate.

Sharyl Attkisson:

There is the whole phenomenon of fact checkers like Snopes, but there's been a proliferation of them since 2016 when a big effort on this front first started. Snopes like Wikipedia has some good, true information but again, it's mixed in with a confusing mix of completely false information and information tainted by corporate and political interests.

Sharyl Attkisson:

I learned that some years ago when investigating the link between breast cancer and antiperspirants not knowing anything about how this industry worked, and Snopes had at the time claim that was a debunked myth, sort of a conspiracy theory. But what I actually learned from the FDA was it was not debunked at all. They were actually actively investigating it. There were several studies that supported the notion of this link. So Snopes was just completely wrong, but the antiperspirant industry and cosmetics industry was putting out this myth notion. And that's what Snopes was fact checking as true that this was all just a myth, but that was completely false what Snopes had.

Sharyl Attkisson:

There also think tanks. Now I remember when I came to Washington, I didn't even understand what a think tank was. And I guess the best way to think of it now is they hire a lot of learned, prominent, important people. A lot of former military, former government officials to put out papers and research and study things. But a lot of people think these are neutral groups, when many of them secretly are working for paid clients and they're writing papers and promoting ideas to Congress and the public that are then discussed at hearings as though the outcome or reporting from a think tank. Well some of that is independent, but a lot of it is not. A lot of it is funded.

Sharyl Attkisson:

Then there's one of my favorites or least favorite, I guess, depending on how you think of it, social media. Twitter is manipulated as you probably understand these days, widely. And even some years ago, there was an example of Twitter conducting an, Ask the President town hall with president Obama. And it was supposed to be like a freewheeling internet session, but a former Twitter, senior employee later blew the whistle that the head of Twitter had ordered employees to build an algorithm, to filter out negative tweets that might be directed at President Obama during this Ask the President town hall. And Twitter also manually censored tweets in case the automated system didn't work well enough. And the decision to control the message was kept secret from some senior employees, said this former Twitter employee for fear that they would object.

Sharyl Attkisson:

I think it's only gotten worse since then. I have watched my Twitter reach kind of dial backwards, even as my number of followers has quadrupled. I can tell something's amiss. I've watched the number of impressions go backwards in real time, I've recorded that, which is technically impossible. There's a lot of manipulation going on on Twitter.

Sharyl Attkisson:

Facebook of course has its own demons. We've talked about that in recent podcasts. How they're censoring information, using fact checkers that in some cases work for the special interests who are trying to censor perfectly accurate information, for example, on China and the Corona virus. Former insiders at Facebook have come forward to claim that news is sometimes presented or withheld for biased reasons. There was an ex Facebook employee that said he was part of a project that "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to certain readers from the social networks influential trending news section."

Sharyl Attkisson:

And several people who were employed at Facebook as news curators, I really hate that notion because that again only arose in 2016, that there was a need for someone to curate our news for us. But several people who did this curating function at Facebook stepped forward later and said they were instructed to artificially inject selected stories into the trending news module even if the stories were not really popular or trending. More on some of these tactics used these AstroTurf tactics to manipulate our information in the media, right after the break.

Sharyl Attkisson:

We are back and I want to pick up on the information manipulation that's all around us by talking about fake personas. Everybody's using them even our own government. A few years ago, internet hackers revealed a U.S. government project to use fake social media personas to influence opinion. And one of the projects by the government used what they called persona management software to create what they called an army of fake social media profiles maintained by actors. Here's what the government's own project said, "We will create a set of personas on Twitter, blogs, forums, and My Space. These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets and linking together social media, connecting between platforms. Once you have a real name persona, you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected number of previously created social media accounts."

Sharyl Attkisson:

In other words, it's a sophisticated scheme allowing government agents to fool regular people like you and me into believing that multiple individuals are posting original content. The fake accounts can be cleverly set up to post automated content that maintains this illusion. But of course it is not only the U.S. government who is using these tactics. These are broadly being used by all kinds of interests, which is why a lot of times what you see per kind of prevailing opinion on Twitter may not be what prevailing opinion or facts or thought is in real life. In fact, I find it often is not. This is the manipulated artificial reality where they're trying to make you think these are the prevailing opinions and accepted facts.

Sharyl Attkisson:

The last thing that I want to address in this podcast along these lines is the topic of media literacy. In the past couple of years, there's been a massive organized initiative, not just at the federal level, but at the state level actually globally, but including in California, including in countries like France and Brazil, to teach us about media literacy. There are partnerships between nonprofits and universities, news organizations, social media, government, they're all offering to curate fake news on our behalf to teach us how to be literate with media, to tell us what's real, to sensor websites and information that they deem to be fake. They're even trying to pass laws to require that information be supposedly verified and penalize people for posting what they decide is fake news.

Sharyl Attkisson:

In California, there are laws being passed, requiring that they teach media literacy in public schools. Well, what thought comes to your mind with all of this? I'll tell you what comes to mine. These efforts are not organic in general and the public certainly wasn't demanding them. Maybe we've been made to think that we want people to do our thinking, convinced by narratives and propaganda that's been put out there. Maybe it sounds good. The idea of somebody keeping us from seeing lies or certain facts. The problem is I see it is whose truth is it? Who's the judge? Who's backing these efforts financially? Who is going to develop California's new public school curriculum on media literacy? You can bet all kinds of special interests are trying to get a seat at that table, if they don't already have one.

Sharyl Attkisson:

I heard one proponent of teaching media literacy as part of the school curriculum give an example of how it should be taught in school. And it went something like this. If you see a piece of news in a reputable publication like the New York Times or the Washington Post, you can believe it or look on Snopes and see if it's true. But if it's anywhere else or if Snopes says it's unsubstantiated, don't believe it. Now, obviously this is contrary to everything we've discussed today. The problem is the New York Times, the Washington Post, others, they say you should count on, have made some of the biggest reporting mistakes imaginable over the past couple of years.

Sharyl Attkisson:

They've been in some instances, part of this news landscape manipulation. And the problem is if we all just refer to those same couple of sources, trying to manipulate the information landscape, that leaves prevailing wisdom, controlling the narrative more than ever. I mean, under the ideas that they're pushing today to curate our information, we wouldn't know smoking can cause cancer because hey, that was considered against conventional wisdom at one time. The American Medical Association decades ago, which had taken money from cigarette companies said there was nothing to worry about with cigarettes and cancer, that all the studies said there was nothing to worry about. Cigarettes causing health problems back then was fake news according to government, medical experts, corporate interests. So the studies, the whistle blowers, the reporter who exposed the dangers would under today's standards, be censored as fake news, not to be believed.

Sharyl Attkisson:

Yes, there is a problem with getting credible information today, but in my opinion, allowing any third party to put themselves in the middle, whether it's government, corporations, nonprofits, universities, Facebook, that just gives people who are trying to control the narrative another vehicle, another way to do it.

Sharyl Attkisson:

So there are some legitimate media literacy efforts, and you can distinguish them, I think, because they don't try to keep you from accessing information. They don't encourage censorship. They don't point you to only certain sources and topics. They focus on talking about critical thinking skills, understanding messaging, but they support the notion that information should be widely available to all, whatever information it may be. And that it's up to you to determine what you want to listen to, what you think may be accurate and what you may not think is accurate. Remember, oftentimes what authorities say today, whether we're talking about health and medical authorities, government, whoever it is, any administration, it often is proven not to be true later. That should be up to us to call through information we wish to access, however we wish to access it and form our own conclusions.

Sharyl Attkisson:

I also think if you're somebody who does want your information curated, perhaps on Facebook, for example, you should be able to opt in to ask Facebook to do that. Maybe you trust the Facebook fact checkers, even if they do work at the China Wuhan lab. And if so, I think that's your right. And you should say so, but I also think we should be offered the chance to not have our information censored, to not say we're going to put our information in the hands of some third parties that may have vested interests.

Sharyl Attkisson:

By the way, there is a Twitter alternative that is widely been controversialized by the usual suspects as white supremacists and all kinds of bad things. But all it does, it's called gab G-A-B is it lets you control the information, block who you want, block topics you don't want to see such as racist or antisemitic information, which is found on all social media, but you can block that. You can cultivate your own environment yourself, but it's up to you.

Sharyl Attkisson:

And they only censor on gab that which is illegal. It's a very big free speech forum. So if there is speech that's illegal or threatening, that type of thing will be censored on gab. And they work with the FBI when there are questions as do other social media companies, but they don't censor on the basis of what third parties think you ought to be hearing, the judgment they insert on topics of social issues, facts that are out there. You get to do that yourself. It's in your hands. So I like that about gab.

Sharyl Attkisson:

There is another thing that I like to do when I'm searching for original information in context, and it's a bit time consuming, which is kind of sad because at home people thought the news would do this for them in a responsible and accurate way. But the news is too often not reporting information in a responsible and accurate way. So one thing you can do if you have the time and it's what I do is go to C-SPAN. You can see so many original events, hearings, news conferences, speeches in context and in full. And I would say most of the time when I go to the original sourcing, it doesn't have the commentary that's not edited. That what I learn or my takeaway from this information is different than what I've read or seen in the summary that's being reported. I would say most of the time, that's the case. I think there's a lesson for all of us in that.

Sharyl Attkisson:

So I hope I've given you a few guideposts and maybe additional information as you like I try to do and like your friends and family try to do sort through this confusing information landscape that we're faced with today.

Sharyl Attkisson:

I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. Check out justthenews.com and don't forget to subscribe to the Sharyl Attkisson podcast. My other podcast, Full Measure After Hours and all of the, Just The News Podcasts, wherever you like to listen. And if you like the topics that I talk about in these podcasts, you will love my new book, Slanted, How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism. Support independent journalism, and pre order this anywhere. Do your own research, make up your own mind. Think for yourself.