For a fiverr, I'll persona manage you!

 “Thank you very much for this informative post,” the spambot says. “It has been very beneficial to my study of glow worms.” Fantastic, you say, but my piece was on a recent media scandal, not fluorescent grubs.

Obviously, this kind of post is easy to spot. Even in heated conversations in comment sections it’s easy to spot a troll. Astroturfing, however, is sneakier. It’s as pervasive and needy as spam, and as infuriating as a troll.

On the spectrum of spam to troll, the astroturfer sits closer to the spam bot, and a lot of that is owing to the fact that astroturfing has more to do with pretending to be a real poster than pretending to have a real agenda.  

Astroturfing is more intelligent, more strategic, and more authentic looking than any other kind of spam and therefore much more likely to convince regular contributors, or as HappyRockefeller from the Daily Kos says, ‘give the illusion of consensus’, which is a dangerous thing in the democratic online society we’re pleased as punch to inhabit. 

So how do we know who’s authentic, and who’s the vehicle of a PR strategy? There are plenty of tips available on the internet for spotting astroturfers which mainly look at the credible infrastructure associated with online identities, such as IP address, a website history, and other postings.

The practice of maintaining these inauthentic screennames is called Persona Management. It’s is interesting because it brings the robot and the real together. Software algorithms are responsible for maintaining an authentic looking online personality. A company that has erupted out of nowhere, or a blogger commenting on a post with no prior activity is bound to be suspicious, but a person with a history of engagement with a topic appears a little more credible. By creating all of the ‘online furniture’, as dmdyslin says, it results in no one suspecting ‘that they came onto the scene for the first time a moment ago for the sole purpose of attacking an article’.

Up to 10 “pre-aged” accounts are created at once, and are then supported by a series of flexible and static IP addresses which stop websites recognising the fake users, but then add legitimacy to their account over time so that it recognises the same user posting after the initial flood of activity.

So how are you supposed to figure out what’s fake when all signals point to authenticity?

It is possible to figure out whether multiple entries are from the same user. Thisis a useful site that blogger Sandi Keane suggests an alternate way to spotting astroturfing. She examines the semantics of the language used by the posters, noting several keywords like ‘incorporated’ and different phrases that hail nationalists, that ‘follow a pattern in the way they manipulate triggers in the mind to evoke a psychological response.’

Hailing the individual is much more of an active marketing approach, and sometimes the effort to promote a product or agenda is much more noticeable. Persona Management is one of the smoother astroturfing tactics. There are some interestingstories of people being caught out by using their personal accounts, which were tracked back to their company – the competitor of the company they were astroturfing.

I did find, in my hunt for information on how to spot astroturfing, a <a href=" http://astroturfingevidence.wordpress.com" rel="nofollow">suspicious looking blog</a>. On this suspicious looking blog was one blog post, no user information, no other posts and no activity log. This blog had been created for the purpose of ‘outing’ a website <a href="www.fiverr.com">Fiverr</a>. Fiverr is a website run to connect businesses with individuals who will ‘support’ them, all for $5 US. The author of the blog was definitely on to something:

<blockquote> I could tell from the guys eyes and his body language that what he was saying was a complete lie. Then something clicked – I remembered a site I was surfing on a few weeks back, where people would do almost anything for five dollars and I had seen a few advertisments about people making testimonial videos – I  went to the site www.fiverr.com and searched for ‘video testimonial’ – I found the guy who made the video in an instant !

http://fiverr.com/russellwilliams/provide-a-video-testimonial-for-your-product-or-service

You can see the original video as above – or heres my copy below just incase the original gets removed because we are onto him.</blockquote>

But the blog itself is incredibly suspicious, almost as if it was created simply for promoting Fiverr.com. Hmm. On the spam – troll spectrum, this Wordpress and Fiverr sit way over on the canned-ham end.

When it comes to astroturfing yourself, you might want to consider what methods you use, as we will when the website is created. You could choose to stick with Social Media Management or Search Engine Optimisation, but be aware there are other options out there.

Similarly, when it comes to dealing with the comments posted on your site, be aware that some of them still may not be real individuals. You should always keep in mind that users on the internet may not be who they say they are, but when it comes to this stuff – well, they might not even be human.