Glossary: Astroturfing
Launch library · evergreen read
Astroturfing describes coordinated activity carefully designed to look like spontaneous, grassroots public opinion when it is actually organised behind the scenes, often by a single group or interest working deliberately to create that specific impression across many separate accounts or comments at once, hiding the coordination behind the scenes.
The name plays cleverly on the idea of fake grass, an artificial imitation of genuine, organic support that looks real from a distance. Spotting it usually involves noticing unnatural coordination: near identical phrasing across supposedly unrelated accounts, unusual timing that lines up too neatly, or activity concentrated narrowly around one single topic without any real variety.
Because astroturfing depends entirely on appearing organic to succeed, checking account histories and looking specifically for that coordination pattern, rather than judging the content of any single comment in isolation, is usually the more reliable way to identify it accurately and with genuine confidence in the conclusion.