Astroturfing is the practice of creating fake grass-roots organizations to sway public opinion. According to freepress.net, “Astroturf groups fighting media reform manufacture the impression of public opposition to issues like Net Neutrality to sway policy makers and the media. What these groups won’t tell you is that they’re bought and paid for by the phone and cable industry.”
One recent example of astroturfing cited in Wikipedia includes several self-proclaimed seniors groups, whose biggest contributor is the pharmaceutical industry. Another is the “Save Our Species Alliance”, which calls itself a grass-roots organization but is actually a front group for wealthy cattle and timber interests.
For the past several years, the telecommunications and media giants have engaged in some pretty shady practices, including astroturfing, in order to obfuscate the so-called Net Neutrality, or Internet Neutrality debate. Click on the interactive control to the right of the text (couresy of freepress.org) to learn more about how much these companies are spending in order to convince the public and our lawmakers that net neutrality is a bad thing.
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