The spread by government-friendly media of the claim that astroturfing is driving street protests in Poland bore the hallmarks of astroturfing itself, according to an analysis by the Digital Forensic Research Lab, a network of researchers operating within the American think tank the Atlantic Council.

Over the weekend, the website Wpolityce.pl, TVP Info, and "Wiadomości" on TVP 1 suggested that the widespread criticism of the judicial reform proposed by the PiS government was astroturfing, that is, a coordinated action pretending to be a grassroots social movement. An attempt was made to push this thesis on social media. However, according to the analysis by the Digital Forensic Research Lab, the campaign against alleged astroturfing itself bore the hallmarks of astroturfing. On social media, the same slogan frequently appeared: "I oppose the use of the #AstroTurfing mechanism to manipulate Poland!" and usually with the same illustration — yellow text on a black background reading "this is not a rebellion, but a coordinated and paid political marketing campaign."
Almost 16,000 tweets with the hashtag #StopAstroTurfing or #StopNGOSoros were posted on July 22 and 23 of this year from 2,408 accounts. Their number grew slowly until 9 p.m. on Saturday, July 22, and then surged dramatically. The rate of posting rose from three tweets per minute to over 200. That frequency lasted for just under an hour — from 10 p.m. it was 100 tweets per minute, and by midnight it had dropped to 10 tweets per minute. According to the Digital Forensic Research Lab, user activity was also higher than normal — an average of 6.6 tweets per user, and the 50 most active users generated over 5,500 tweets, or more than 35 percent of all comments with those hashtags. With organic traffic, this indicator is 1.5–3.5 tweets per user. Of the 15,000 tweets that used both hashtags, 11,000 had identical content.

Analyzing this behavior, Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, summarizes: "a group of activists kept tweeting using the same slogans, and then retweeted each other." Nimmo notes, however, that this attempt was not very effective, because it was unable to generate any trend that would last longer.

"This is a very basic analysis, which could be a contribution to larger research that would, however, require more work," says Beata Biel, a media training specialist. "It is certainly clear that these hashtags did not spread entirely organically, that they were to some extent artificially supported by bots for a short period, two hours in total, which should probably worry us to some degree. On the basis of this analysis, however, we cannot determine the purpose of this action or who is behind it. That would require larger studies of the connections between accounts, an attempt to identify patient zero, that is, the account that started it," Biel comments.
Michał Rachoń, who made astroturfing the main topic of his Sunday program "Woronicza 17" on TVP Info, justified it precisely by internet users' interest.

source: press.pl