The Sunday Feed

Astroturfing

Every generation will always tell you a cliché, “ Things are different today.” However, technology has narrowed down the width of the generation gap so much that what used to be 10 years came down to 5 and now it can be defined to as low as 2. In just 2 years, the world can change so much that someone like me can feel quite antiquated.

Innovation has made many old jobs redundant and given birth to some pretty funny yet lucrative careers. Take Chef for example. It is a job that can be crudely defines as a glorified cook. Not any more! Today many are considered to be celebrities for preparing things that look good on camera but come with a high likelihood that it will not be friendly to the palates. Some people have taken up the job of making fun of other people on YouTube, what we commonly refer to as those who roast other people and their content. But the greatest of them all is those who make a living out of trolling.

Yes you heard that right. Looks like we are headed to a world where this word that used to be merely associated with Scandinavian folklores to describe giants has taken everybody by surprise. Like in the movies, a villain serves a purpose and that is to create the challenge for the hero to overcome so that people can applaud that and the protagonist grows in stature.

Just to give you an example, there is a lawyer who advertises his business in my community. He got trolled by a random person who said that the services were not good! Instead of keeping quiet, the lawyer defied him openly and said that he had never met that person and that he was a troll trying to defame people doing genuine business. The lawyer won the case because the troll never came back.

In adversity lies opportunity and the businesses know that. The sheer definition of a business is to create a solution for a problem or hype the problem so much that people go scampering looking for the solution. Remember the problem created by people living in Australia when COVID-19 just broke in and there was a massive shortage of toilet paper. People were seen fighting for every roll, throwing not just abuses but punches at each other. Just to keep their bottoms clean. These people never knew that water was a better tool for the job. Or at least a good temporary substitute!

So how do businesses make use of this new phenomenon? Well, as they say, no publicity is a bad publicity. If you can create a controversy though trolls on your topic, then suddenly people start talking about it. And, if too many of them start talking, it makes its way to the top of the news section and starts to trend. Once you have reached that phase, it is completely up to you as to how you engineer the situation to your advantage. If you are savvy, you can capitalise heavily on it.

This then pushes the subject to the domain of science rather than just an art or a random act of luck. Mathematics is a great tool that can allow you to arrive at algorithms that can help to manipulate the people’s mind. It is a tool that will tell you what is the breaking point at which you need to feed the conversation to prolong it. Or, how much of a defence is required before you get offensive. It can also tell you what do to get the sympathy vote and what emotions to use to get people’s attention and so on.

Many businesses have discovered that they can hire online trolls like digital mercenaries. This is called Corporate astroturfing where the company introduces trolls and shills on a content. The trolls will talk negative and the shills will try to neutralise it. A risky game but can be quite favourable if it works for you. I guess a good strategy for a well-established company that is associated with non-essential items like fashion and luxury because for a startup it can prove to be too risky.

All this sounds pretty normal and can be easily seen as a byproduct of what we call evolution. But it is not all that easy to just overlook the dangers. This can become very lethal if it is used by minors or more so against them. The mind of a minor is as fragile as a thin glass and can be shattered to pieces by just one incident. The bigger problem here is that the minors usually don’t like to share their lives with their parent or guardians and so will try to resolve issues by themselves.

So how do we ensure that people can handle this dangerous new phenomenon wisely? Companies should take a lead to begin with and ask the authorities to create legislations that severely punish businesses actively doing all this for publicity. As far as a the minors go, there should be a subject on cyber security and cyber safety more from the psychological point of view rather than technical. Every child in the school should be given a senior as a guide to whom they can speak to if such a situation arises because they might not be comfortable speaking to the teachers. Teachers should make it a habit to address this on a daily basis before they begin the class because a one-minute assurance can go a long way in saving someone’s life.