Read the full story here: http://nyti.ms/1FS7tWy

This is a fascinating expose by New York Times writer Adrian Chen about “troll farms” in Russia. Troll farms are highly secretive business organizations that hired numerous individuals to create and maintain thousands of fake social media profiles. The profiles are used to spread disinformation and propaganda across the Net.

What really caught my attention about this article is that this particular organization (one of many) is targeting not just people in Russia but also in the USA. Chen opens the article with a vivid account of a false report of a chemical spill at the Columbia Chemical plant in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, which took place on September 11th, 2014. Twitter users were live tweeting the supposed event using #ColumbianChemicals and sending comments to local media. Another user even posted a video showing an explosion at a gas station which was supposedly part of the spill. A YouTube video was also posted of ISIS claiming credit for this as a terrorist attack. All of this, as it turns out, was fabricated. There was never any spill or explosion. There was no ISIS attack. In just two hours these unidentified people created a storm of panic from half way across the world.

Using fake online profiles is not a completely new phenomenon. It is known as “astroturfing” which is a play on the idea of “grassroots.” A grassroots organization is a type of collective action which is self organized by a group or movement of individuals. It is organized from the bottom-up, meaning that it lacks formal hierarchical structure and instead relies on high levels of community-based member participation. This can include anything from a social movement like Occupy Wall Street to smaller, more localized groups such as neighborhood NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) campaigns which organize to opposed the nearby siting of hazardous waste facilities. Such campaigns and movements have become more common in recent times due to the facilitating affordances of email and social media. “Astroturfing” is named as such because it is fake grassroots, just as astroturf is a synthetic form of grass.

According to Chen, the disinformation campaign in Louisiana “was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention.” And this, it seems, may have been just a practice run. In a world where social media has become the main source of news for many, especially Millennials, this new type of information manipulation can be extremely dangerous and could easily cause widespread panic. In a more subtle way, these trolls could quietly manipulate public opinion, or at least flood online discourse with so much disinformation as to render it useless as a tool for self organization and political participation. Of course, Russia is not the only one fooling around with astroturfing, reports have also shown similar activities by US and British intelligence agencies.