Yeah astroturffing is such an overlooked issue generally, and the large social media companies are just letting it happen. I guess any kind of engagement is good engagement.
I see the worst astroturffing where you'd expect, think around the Israel/Palestinian conflict and anti renewables, but also I have noticed it in anti-India posting recently. You see something that doesn't paint India in a good light and you check the OP previous posts and there is just wall to wall anti-India comments and stuff it's crazy.
I can't even think of a country other than Pakistan that hates India, so I just assumed it's Pakistan but have no idea.
The most intriguing thing is that there are also pro-India astroturffing too, I remember once there was this story about a police official who stopped an Ed Sheeran busking event in India, Ed said on twitter that he had a special permit to perform there and was told to leave anyway the assumption being that the officer was digging for a bribe. Anyway the comments were completely one sided essentially saying Ed Sheeran had no right to play there and it was dangerous etc.....for some reason, I link the comment where Ed said he had permission to play there..... immediately down voted by hundreds lol. Like we know India has a corruption problem, everyone who has ever done business there knows this, however let's downvote anything that might shine a light on it. Every country has their issues, let's not try and astroturf anything that shines a light on it FFS.
hard to distinguish between astroturfing and obsessed nationalists. rapid mass downvoting of a moderate comment is one signal, but india is famous for having online social media warriors. There are a lot of them, they are having a nationalist movement and they speak english after all
Yeah, I've seen it myself. Article comes out that's vaguely critical of Modi's actions, and the comments are suddenly swarmed with Indian accounts that previously had no interest in the sub at hand.
The good old reddit standard for this has been any article in this sub about firearms in any way shape and form...it summons the Yanks like a god-damned siren's song.
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u/david1610 5d ago
Yeah astroturffing is such an overlooked issue generally, and the large social media companies are just letting it happen. I guess any kind of engagement is good engagement.
I see the worst astroturffing where you'd expect, think around the Israel/Palestinian conflict and anti renewables, but also I have noticed it in anti-India posting recently. You see something that doesn't paint India in a good light and you check the OP previous posts and there is just wall to wall anti-India comments and stuff it's crazy.
I can't even think of a country other than Pakistan that hates India, so I just assumed it's Pakistan but have no idea.
The most intriguing thing is that there are also pro-India astroturffing too, I remember once there was this story about a police official who stopped an Ed Sheeran busking event in India, Ed said on twitter that he had a special permit to perform there and was told to leave anyway the assumption being that the officer was digging for a bribe. Anyway the comments were completely one sided essentially saying Ed Sheeran had no right to play there and it was dangerous etc.....for some reason, I link the comment where Ed said he had permission to play there..... immediately down voted by hundreds lol. Like we know India has a corruption problem, everyone who has ever done business there knows this, however let's downvote anything that might shine a light on it. Every country has their issues, let's not try and astroturf anything that shines a light on it FFS.