Astroturfing

Web 2.0, is supposedly the peoples internet. Anyone can run a blog, start an event on facebook, or edit wikipedia. Manny thinkers from leftist academics to business have hailed this new version of the web as the emergence of a genuinely participatory culture. However, the reality of the internet (like technology in general) is much less cut and dry.
The same resources used to initate a grassroots campaign can just as easily be used to create a fake grass-roots campaign. In fact, this is becoming commonn enough that there is now a word for it: Astroturfing.
This was brought to my attention in a series of articles published at the alternative news site, exiledonline devoted to the Rick Snatelli and the Chicago tea party campaign. Conservative NBC commentator Rick Santelli posted an angry blog entry about how fed up he was with Obama's Stimulus Plan, and announced his plan to hole a "Chicago Tea party" to protest. Hours later websites such chicagoteaparty.com sprang up, and a nationwide "tea party" movement was set up. There were blogs, facebook events, twitter "tweets", the whole shebang. Yet, not many showed up to these protests despite the huge internet presence or media coverage.
As it turns out, the whole thing was funded by Freedomworks, a right-wing thinktank, run by Dick Armey. May of the tea party domain names were purchased before Santelli's blog post. The whole thing was not to form a movement, but to give the appearance of one.
This plan backfired dramatically. Santelli's scheduled interview was dropped from the Daily Show, and I'm sure that this debaucle is not going to help him keep his job.
It's pretty interesting to know that a purely digital fake portest can have a the same effect as a real one.