What is astroturfing?

Astroturfing is an marketing technique with extremely significant potential that originated in the United States to create consensus around a specific good or service. 

This technique is also used at a political level and has already been employed to generate grassroots support to help a candidate win and set up a targeted campaign that promotes them aggressively.

Astroturfing on the web

To carry out astroturfing, one can use traditional methods, but for setting up massive actions with broad scope, the web, especially social media, is preferred.

Basically, resources are paid to speak well or poorly of the product or service being reviewed or discredited.

There are several players in this case:

• The astroturfer: users with multiple profiles and online influence groups whose goal is to create the belief that what is said in those circles is the truth;

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Fake profiles: fictitious users who tend to help expand common comments and opinions;

Trolls: a figure now famous on the web. They are the so-called promoters of hate, paid to discredit and provoke, useful for creating virality in posts.

Origin of the Name and Purpose

The term astroturfing originates from Astro Turf, an artificial grass used in football fields. The term is opposed to grassroots, its natural counterpart. It's important to clarify: this technique tends to distort reality and create absolutely artificial consensus.

In contrast, even grassrooots is translated into a more natural marketing technique that has the same objectives but does not distort reality, instead shaping it organically.

Example of Astroturfing

The Sunday Times, the famous English magazine, has created an astroturfing campaign against Amazon to highlight the flaws in the American e-commerce giant's review system.

A book full of errors and inaccuracies became a top seller in just a few weeks, all by investing only 65 pounds and three days of work.

Amazon quickly removed the reviews and attempted to close the security loopholes as soon as possible.