Astroturfing, which sounds like a new teen trend of fucking artificial grass
while eating Cascade pods.
That's right. The teens have moved on from Tide. It's all about Cascade now.
Astroturfing is the practice of corporations or political groups disguising themselves
as spontaneous, authentic, popular movements. It's basically fake grassroots.
That's why they call it, "Astroturfing." It's a very funny, very clever name.
Now, you're probably familiar with Astroturfing as a concept from seeing ads by
groups with a generic populist-sounding names like Americans Against Food Taxes
delivering weirdly specific messages like these.
[Mother] Washington is talking about a
new tax on juice drinks and soda. They say it's only pennies.
Well, those pennies add up when you're trying to feed a family.
Washington, if you're listening, what doesn't seem like much to you, can be a lot to us.
[Male Voice] Tell Congress, no taxes on juice drinks and sodas.
Now, it won't surprise you to learn that Americans Against Food Taxes was not started by regular Americans
pooling their resources together to take out a large ad buy on national TV about
their number one problem priority, a proposed soda tax. No, it was a front
group for the food and beverage industry which makes a lot more sense.
Soda companies have a lot of money. At least enough to convince LeBron James
to pretend he drinks Sprite. Sprite: diabetes you can taste.
And, while you might think well, yeah, but that's obvious.
I'd never fall for astroturf bullshit like that, don't be quite so sure
because with dark money surging in the wake of decisions like Citizens United.
Astroturf techniques are now becoming more sophisticated, effective and dangerous
and they are not going away, so tonight, we thought it might be useful to take a
look at some of those techniques to help us better spot them in the future.
Let's just start with the names themselves because sometimes groups are
created with deliberately misleading names.
For instance, the group Save our Tips which purportedly speaks for
waitstaff is an anti-minimum wage increase group funded by restaurant owners.
The National Wetlands Coalition worked on behalf of oil companies and
real estate developers and the American Council on Science and Health has been
funded by among other things, fracking interests, soda companies,
E-cigarette companies and chemical manufacturers, so it's pure straight-up opposite world.
It's like if this show is called Funny Time Happy Hour with Chuckle-Hunk John Oliver,
It's just demonstrably false. We can't back that shit up. And, look it's not
always easy to spot exactly what the group's motive is especially with an ad like this.
{Male voice] Don't eat here! I'm mad! What's with your people tossing money at
the Humane Society of the United States? These HSUS losers aren't even affiliated
with your local pet shelter. For more information go to humanewatch.org.
That is a very strange ad because first of all, if you're going to have a talking dog,
why would you make him such a gruff asshole? Hey, I'm Tony and I'm mad
the Humane Society's a bunch of losers and if you disagree you can suck my dog dick!
[Audience Laughing]
And second.. second, who would take out an attack ad on the Humane Society? A rival
even Humane-er Society? Puppy mills? Self-loathing dogs? It's impossible to
say for sure. All I can tell you is that ad is the work of Rick Berman,
a PR expert who's known in the industry as Dr. Evil. He is known for his defenses
of controversial products from secondhand smoke, to trans fats, to payday loans.
He's also created nonprofit groups that have fought regulation of all of those things.
In fact, it's one of those groups the Center for Consumer Freedom,
which was credited on that Humane Society attack ad, so if is the Center for Consumer Freedom
a front group for Berman's corporate clients? Is it at all relevant that Rick Berman has
shown up at events for the Pork industry, an industry which has been targeted by
the Humane Society in the past for the use of gestation crates, or as Rick
Berman insists on calling them "maternity pens," I can't say. I legally can't say.
I want to. I badly want to, but I've been explicitly told I can't. You can probably
guess but I can't say it out loud. What I can say is that Berman rejects any
accusation that he runs front groups for corporate clients saying, "There is no
front because there is total transparency" which is a little odd
considering we don't know who's behind many of his campaigns and that message
of transparency does seem to significantly change whenever he's
behind closed doors because here is audio of Berman pitching his services to
a group of oil executives.
[Berman's voice] "People always ask me one question all the time.
You said, how do I know is that I won't be found out as a
supporter of what you're doing?
We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organization
that are insulated from having to disclose donors, there's total anonymity."
See, transparency. But, look... look he is right.
There is total anonymity and just as a general rule, if the most common question
you get asked is how do I know no one will find out I'm doing business with you?
That's not a great sign. If the same privacy guarantee that Hardee's gives
all of its customers,
"Don't worry none of your friends family or coworkers will ever find out that you've been doing this.
Now, go and enjoy your monster thickburger before the horse meat gets cold."
But, astroturfing is more, way more than just funneling money through nonprofit
front groups. Groups can also recruit questionable experts to lend their
arguments credibility. There are multiple examples of this, but my favorite
concerns a group called Citizens for Fire Safety. A few years back, health
officials in California wanted to remove a requirement that furniture contained
chemical flame retardants as they had been linked to cancer, but Citizens for
Fire Safety produced a Burn Surgeon, Dr. David Heimbach who argued for keeping
all of those flame-retardant requirements by telling them a pretty memorable story.
7- week old baby was in a crib, laying on a fire-retardant mattress
on a non-fire retardant pillow. Mom put a candle in the crib, candle fell over, the
baby sustained a 50-percent burn. The entire upper half of her body was burned.
Now, this is a tiny little person, no bigger than my Italian Greyhound at home.
She ultimately died after about three weeks of pain and misery in the hospital.
Now, that sounds horrifying. But, there are some weird things about what he just said.
First, I don't know why he felt the need to compare the size of a baby to his Italian Greyhound,
everyone knows what size a baby is.
Nobody's never seen a baby. So wait, it's like a person but smaller. Tell me more!
Doesn't use stilts? How does it board a bus?
What I'm picturing is something about the size of five hamsters taped together.
Or, very small lawnmower. Am I around the right ballpark here?
But second, if part of you there was wondering
Hold on. Who puts a candle in their baby's crib?
You're not alone. Journalists with the Chicago Tribune wondered the exact same
thing and they soon discovered that two years earlier, Heimbach had testified
before a different California panel telling a weirdly similar story.
I will tell you about a child I took care of in April. Mom had a candle sitting
beside the bed, left the room for seven minutes. For reasons we don't know, the
child that candle turned over, the child sustained an 80 percent burn.
Okay so, now this is starting to sound a little suspicious. How many people are putting
lit candles in and around their baby's cribs? Oh, I just put little Ethan to bed.
I put plenty of lit candles in his crib as a nightlight and I balance several
sharp knives and open cans of paint thinner right on the crib wall so he has something to look at.
Look.. look, Heimbach wasn't done because just a year later, he was testifying before
the state legislature in Alaska and guess what?!
[Heimbach's voice] A six-week-old baby that I took care
of earlier this year, mother went away, there was a candle on the bureau, somehow the
dog knocked the candle onto the crib and the little girl sustained this
seventy-five percent very devastating burn.
Wait, so now there's a dog involved all of a sudden? What kind of dog would do such a thing?
Wait a second, I know exactly what kind of dog.
A gruff, needlessly Italian dog like Tony.
By God! By God! As if... as if sensing that lawmakers there were questioning his motives.
The very next sentence Heimbach said completely unprompted was this.
[Heimbach's voice] I am not in the pocket of anybody that makes a specific flame retardant.
Now, to be fair, he's actually right about that.
He was not in the pocket of someone that made a specific flame retardant.
He was however, in the pocket of Citizens for Fire Safety who paid him $240,000 for his help and who it turned out only had
three members which were the three largest makers of flame retardants in
the world, so I call it liar, liar pants chemically incapable of catching on fire.
Oh, and one more thing. When a reporter called the medical examiner's office,
they had no record of any burn victim matching Heimbach's description whatsoever,
so one of them did the next logical thing.
I thought the best thing to do was just to call him at home.
I said those kids you talked about, did they all die in your hospital?
He said it wasn't factual it, was anecdotal. And I said, but that's not what you testified.
and he said, Well, I wasn't under oath.
Okay, okay. Well first of all, you're generally
expected to tell the truth, even when you're not under oath and second of all,
anecdotes aren't the same as lies. I saw Keri Russell walking out of a bakery.
That's an anecdote. It's not a good anecdote, but it is an anecdote. I saw
Keri Russell riding a dragon out of a bakery. That is a lie. Although, admittedly
would be a way better story. And, look the real problem there is Heimbach's lies worked;
that flame-retardant bill in California initially failed thanks in
part to his testimony. And.. and the final and perhaps most controversial tool in
astroturfing relates to something that our current president actually loves to complain about.
I'll tell you what. You take a look outside.
These are paid protesters, folks. The protesters are paid a lot of money by the DNC. It turned out that the
protesters we used to have were bought for $1,500 a piece.
We have a protester. By the way, were you paid $1,500 to be a thug?
Now, I can't work it quite out there.
Is Trump angry there or is he excited he's just stumbled onto a job opportunity that
Don, Jr and Eric would actually be qualified for? But while Trump's specific
accusations were nonsense. Paid demonstrators do exist which Trump
should frankly know himself because his campaign reportedly had actors who were
paid $50 to cheer for him at his campaign announcement.
But.. but paid demonstrators are one of the most infuriating tools of Astroturfing.
Just... just look at what happened last year in New Orleans.
A company called, Entergy needed city council approval for a controversial power
plant which it got not long after a public meeting where by sheer chance,
a bunch of huge power plant fans in orange shirts turned up.
Now, it later emerged that a PR firm working for Entergy hired
a company called, Crowds on Demand which recruited actors to support the plant.
They did this with a Facebook ad which offered and, I quote, $60 to $200
dollarydoos to help with a gig for three hours, which in itself, right there, is a red flag.
Dollarydoos? Sounds like slang for money that you'd find in a Mark Twain
novel called, "Even for the 1800s, there are way too many "N" words in this."
Crowd on Demand even provided talking points such as: Folks, this is 2017.
"We had a boil water advisory here last month and I'm tired of feeling like I live in a
third world country." and it seems like some of the people there took those notes and ran with them.
I'm tired of feeling like we're living in a third world country. This is the United States of America.
It's 2017 going on 2018 and we have to worry about these frequent water boil
advisories and so on, and so forth. I have to be concerned that a grandmother, or a
son, or a pet could possibly drink or take in some brain-eating amoeba.
Yeah, I'll give him credit for that last bit. The brain-eating amoeba bit was all his own.
He was just riffing hard at that point. Now.. now, that man insists that he
believed everything he said and that he wasn't paid by Crowds on Demand.
Although, you should know that another person there who does admit to being paid
said he received instructions that read: A few things to keep in mind. One, tell nobody
you're being paid. Two, tell nobody you're being paid. Three, media will be present
do not talk to them. Four, tell nobody you're being paid and Five, if somebody
approaches you, don't tell them you're being paid, which are and this is true,
word-for-word the vows in a traditional Scientology wedding. Now, they're
beautiful vows and you should go. Now, if you are wondering who is behind
Crowds on Demand, let me introduce you to their CEO Adam Swart. The answer to the
question, what if a lukewarm bottle of Smirnoff Ice was a person? Now.. now, he's..
he's pretty unrepentant about what his firm does.
[Interviewer's Voice] Have you ever provided protesters for an event?
[Swart] Of course.
Demonstrators?
[Swart] Of course.
Do you see anything wrong with that?
[Swart] Personally, nope.
Do you ever feel like you're tricking people though into getting behind
something that they may have not gotten behind if they didn't see all this activity there?
[Swart] We don't trick people, we engage them.
Yeah, yeah but you engage them by tricking them, don't you?
Both.. both of those things can be true at the same time, it's like someone saying I'm
not masturbating in the middle of this Pinkberry.
I'm just engaging the police department. You're actually doing both and one
doesn't make the other okay. Now, of course, Swart's whole ruse is predicated
on people holding their nerve and not giving the game away in real time.
But, amazingly, that has happened.
[Female's reporters voice] In the small town of Camarillo,
[Male citizen's voice] I think the city needs a shake up.
Citizens aren't shy about expressing their opinions but one chilly Wednesday night in December,
[City Councilman's Voice] Prince Jordan Tyson?
City officials say this man stood out.
[Man's voice]This case is clearly common sense.
[Reporter's voice] Because for three minutes, he told the City Council what he later admits was a lie.
[Tyson]I'm just a concerned citizen coming up here and speaking to you.
[Reporter's voice] But, he's not. he's a self-described struggling actor from Beverly Hills
who goes by the name of Prince Jordan Tyson.
Okay no, I don't believe it. I do not believe it does anything about this face.
This face say struggling actor from Beverly Hills to you?
I'm sorry this story just doesn't check out.
But, incredibly, it's true. Because while they know "Notorious PJT" initially claimed to be
from the area. He soon had a crisis of confidence culminating in this.
[Reporter's voice] Forty minutes later, Tyson came back to the podium.
[City Councilman's Voice] Prince is back.
[Reporter's voice] For one of the strangest moments the City Council has ever seen.
[Tyson] I don't agree with the reason I'm here and I was paid to be here.
[City Councilman's Voice] How much were you paid?
[Tyson] A hundred bucks.
[City Councilman's Voice] How much?
[Tyson] A hundred dollars.
You're fucking idiot, Prince! You just broke Crowd on Demand's rules 1, 2, 4 and 5.
Now you won't get those hundred dollarydoos
which could have gone toward changing your name to
literally anything else, or getting a haircut that doesn't make you look like
an al dente Owen Wilson. When you add all of this together, faith groups hiring
fake experts and fake crowds which managed to affect real world change, it
gets pretty dispiriting and it can do real damage that goes way beyond the
narrow issues that each group is trying to influence. The very existence of
companies like Crowds on Demand mean that something authentic can now be tainted.
In fact, conspiracy boards now regularly and wrongly cite Crowds on Demand as providing everything from paid
protesters for Charlottesville, to crisis actors for the Las Vegas shooting and that is hugely dangerous because the
consequences of this cannot be that everyone assumes that anyone who doesn't
agree with them is astroturf. You know what? While skepticism is healthy,
cynicism, real cynicism is toxic and because this problem isn't going it away,
it is now even more incumbent on us to use our judgment diligently.
If the Ray Liotta of dogs is telling us the Humane Society is terrible,
it's probably worth us all asking, why? Why? Who might have trained him? and
What do they stand to gain? And, unfortunately, until we find out a way to force
Astroturf groups to be more transparent and accountable, that's about all we can do right now.
Astroturf is a serious threat to our public discourse and it is
critical that we are all much more aware of its dangers
and since astroturfers have left all their tools lying around, at the very least,
we might as well use them to fight candle fire with candle fire and deliver
a heartfelt message.
[Narrator's voice] We're all Americans. Real people definitely not actors. We're just a
coalition of concerned doctors, mothers, teachers, and kidnappers
and we think you deserve the truth about Astroturfers.
Here are the facts. Astroturfers are responsible for every
shark attack in American history. Wonder all the bees have gone? Astroturfers shot
them in the face and according to the Bipartisan Institute of Factual Science Studies,
every single Astroturfer has killed at least one puppy with their
bare hands, or maybe not. We're not under oath. The point is that Astroturfers
set this baby on fire. That's not a dog, that's a real baby, no bigger than an
Italian Greyhound. Her name's Eleanor and she likes four things.
Her binky, ba-ba, corporate and political transparency, and not being on fire.
And right now, Eleanor is 0 for 4 and if you're not careful,
one day an Astroturfer is going to come to your house and light your baby on fire.
Stop Astroturfing.
[Another Narrator's voice] Paid for by Citizens for Fresher Orange Juice.
[Audience laughing]