The Brilliance of Astroturfing
What is “astroturf,” and how is it distinguished from genuine populist outrage? It’s the question that’s been riling the health-care debate — which, in and of itself, should tell you just how far things have gone off the rails for President Obama and his fellow reform proponents.
Forget the debate about a public option, forget making insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions, forget co-ops. What’s the deal with all these yahoos showing up at town halls and screaming about Soviet Russia?
To liberals in New York City — and I’m sure elsewhere — the whole thing is incomprehensible. So it must be part of some big insurance-company plot to derail health-care reform. Far from being a legitimate form of democratic protest, these town-hall interlopers must be “thugs” and “brown shirts” set on thwarting democracy — all at the end of a leash held by Big Pharma or whatever other bogeyman you choose.
What is it, though, that makes these protests “illegitimate”? Well, I’d argue… nothing. What’s got health-care-reform proponents upset is just how effectively this form of political protest exploits certain loopholes in the human psyche — namely, how quickly humans can be convinced, falsely, that their fellow humans have formed a consensus.
First, as to whether the protests constitute “astroturf.” Julian Sanchez had an excellent post recently explaining why that term is essentially meaningless in the current media landscape:
Any “astroturf” campaign on the modern media landscape is going to require actually ginning up some broad-based activism if it’s going to be effective. And any genuinely spontaneous, bottom-up action that seems even moderately interesting and resonant with national issues is going to find a whole lot of political professionals eager to promote, guide, replicate, or co-opt it. Sure, you can still talk about more or less manufactured movements, but the lines seem a lot blurrier to me. If a few locals decide maybe there should be a rally in the town square, and a high-profile blogger or Twitter user picks it up and promotes it, is that astroturf? What if it’s the big-name activist who has the idea, and the locals decide to pick it up and run with it? In cases like this, the differences just don’t seem nearly as profound anymore.
Without a doubt, the current anti-reform protests have been organized in a significant sense by Freedom Works, a small-government group headed by former GOP majority leader Dick Armey. But, just as surely, these protests have been fueled by real anger and fear among conservatives who — right or wrong — fear that a government intervention in the health-care system will lead to what they think of as “socialized medicine,” which they believe will lead to significant rationing of care at the direction of government bureaucrats.
Now, there are plenty of arguments against these protesters’ positions (and in favor of them). But just because you buy into one argument and they buy into another doesn’t make their form of protest illegitimate. And while you may think they’re crossing the line by disturbing the town halls, if you look at the town halls as their own form of manufactured political theater — which they certainly are, designed by incumbent politicians to make them look responsive to their constituents’ concerns — what you’ve got is really just one set of political thespians versus another.
So, why has one group of thespians so thoroughly gained the upper hand?
Because they understand — intuitively, if not scientifically — that he who speaks first and loudest and most often controls what’s perceived as the group consensus. In a study covered by Neuroworld back in March, a group of researchers found that people estimate the consensus of their peers almost solely based on how many times they’ve heard a particular opinion. While people could tell that three separate people expressing a particular opinion in a group was a better gauge of group opinion than just one person expressing an opinion three times, it was only just barely. One person repeating his or her opinion three times had 90% of the effect of three separate people saying it.
Who shouts the loudest in a town hall is (of course) not even close to a scientific poll of public opinion. But when people see the same image on the news over and over — protesters interrupt health-care town hall, old lady shouts that Democrats want to euthanize her, housewife yells that Obama wants to turn America into the U.S.S.R. — they quickly come to believe that this is what most people think of health-care reform.
As the study puts it:
[T[he more often an opinion has been encountered in the past, the more accessible it is in memory and the more familiar it seems when it is encountered again. When multiple previous exposures are due to expressions of the same opinion by different communicators, familiarity is a valid cue for estimating extensity. We assume, however, that feelings of familiarity increase with the number of exposures, independent of their source. If so, then hearing the same opinion, say, three times from the same communicator may result in the erroneous impression that it is widely shared—an overestimation of extensity.
This effect holds with just one person expressing an opinion three times. Imagine how much more effective it is when people are popping up at separate locations across the country expressing the same opinion. (And, keep in mind that the effect still holds even if the public sees all these protesters as one entity — they’re still repeating the same opinion three times.)
Now, you can say that the protesters are “cheating” because there’s some organization to get people to show up. But, again, since the people showing up seem to believe what they’re saying — they’re not unemployed actors being given a script, and they’re acting far crazier than any organizer would want —it’s hard to see what’s truly illegitimate here.
You may not like what the protesters are doing, but they’ve found a truly effective way of doing it.
If I were designing the Democratic response to this, I wouldn’t have the president going around trying to debunk the “death panels” nonsense — remember, debunking bad information just tends to reinforce it. I’d be organizing my own “astroturf” counter-protests in favor of popular parts of the reform bill. Don’t fight on the ground your enemy’s chosen; you’ve lost before the battle begins. Create your own counter-narrative and manufacture your own consensus. Sure it’s cynical. We’re a cynical animal.
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
Excellent post. I wrote a column a few days ago about how the media spin over the town brawls boils down to whether the protesters are “real people” — in other words, whether they are in-group or out-group members.
http://www.wiserthanthecrowd.com/2009/08/real-people.html
Well, it provides an allegedly scientific explanation of what’s happening at those protest rallies — oooops! I mean Democratic town-hall meetings. It also suggests a workable-but-cynic response for Democrats. But I think it overlooks a point or two:
I recall six, eight months ago when the bail-out package caused an uproar in Congress. Public opinion was running a hundred-to-one against the legislation but Democrats passed it anyway. I recall the e-mails and letters I sent to every member of the Iowa congressional delegation. I recall, especially, the cynical, condescending replies I recived from my own representative, Dave Loebsack (D-IA), and from Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA), of a neighboring disctrict. Both men lied to me as if I was a child. The truth of the matter was plain: neither of them gave a shit what constituents wanted. Democratic leadership wanted the legislation and leadership got its way.
Millions of us wanted Democrats to pursue criminal investigations of Bush-administration crimes. Pelosi and her mob refused to do their duty (for whatever reason), saying there was no evidence to justify any such proceedings. It is a lie. We all know it’s a lie. Today we get e-mails from Rep. Wexler (D-FL) and from Sen. Leahy (D-VT). Leahy, in particular, wants to get us all fired up to support his ‘truth and reconciliation commission,’ that will investigate Republican crimes, assign guilt where guilt is found, and then forgive the guilty parties.
Through it all, Democrats may be practicing good party discipline, but it’s party discipline to a misguided end. Knowing that neither man respects me, I no longer believe anything either of them says. Many other voters, I’m sure, feel the same. Democrats have only themselves to blame, then, for the fact that Republican wingnuts come in and bust up their meetings while reasonable constituents watch the show in silence. Nobody jumps up to speak for the Democrats because everybody knows the Democrats are liars.
Sager’s article typifies behavior we’ve seen from Democrats these last thirty years. Democrats sold out to big money long ago. They no longer care what any of us want. Instead their attitude is that if the lies they’re currently telling don’t work for them, they’ll NOT change policy but will instead come up with new justifications for the same old shit.
What this whole thing reveals is that neither the Republicans NOR the Democrats have yet learned their lesson. Into that void in their thinking I can only call attention to the fact: Last week a gun fell out of somebody’s coat and landed on the floor of a town-hall meeting. Watching CNN, we were told it was a licensed firearm and that it was dropped by accident. We voters were told not to worry.
The reassurance was wasted on me: I’m not worried by that gun and never was. I don’t need to worry because when the protesters start pulling guns on purpose, they won’t be shooting at me.
[...] got an op-ed on “Astroturf” in the health care debate (expanding on what I discussed here on Neuroworld last week): WITH the “public option” part of President Obama’s health care [...]
It’s true that the line between bottom-up activism and top-down activism is getting more and more blurred… but it doesn’t mean that the word “astroturf” is no longer meaningful.
There are some campaigns which are very definitely “astroturf”. These are campaigns in which the organizers running the campaign go out of their way to hide themselves and pretend they have nothing to do with it. To cite some examples from the climate regulation brouhaha: The latest Bonner and Associates forged letters scandal is a very clear-cut example of astroturf. This is another example of astroturf.
And about the anti-healthcare riots… they definitely suck, and they’re egged on by FreedomWorks, but I won’t consider them as astroturf — and the key reason is that FreedomWorks has been pretty open about its involvement.
– bi
[...] that this “bipartisan” support is more broad-based than it is? Well, remember our discussion here of astroturfing a little while back: [A] group of researchers found that people estimate the consensus of their [...]
[...] Neuroworld looked at why astroturf works here. [...]
[...] Keep Off the Astroturf: "Generated mail is a pretty old idea. In Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar,’ Brutus is persuaded to assassinate Caesar in part by letters of support from the public — letters that were actually faked by Cassius ‘in several hands … as if they came from several citizens.’" Ryan Sager, New York Times. See also: The Brilliance of Astroturfing. [...]