Meaning
The deceptive practice of manufacturing the appearance of grassroots support for a product, policy or cause, masking the real sponsor so that paid or scripted activity looks spontaneous and volunteer-driven. The name plays on AstroTurf, the artificial-grass brand, as fake 'grass roots'. Pejorative and quasi-technical; used in politics, PR and platform-policy contexts to allege deception. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Coined in 1985, attributed to US Senator and later Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, a Texan whose office received a flood of orchestrated cards and letters backing insurance-industry positions. He reportedly quipped that 'a fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grass roots and Astroturf', giving the fake-grass metaphor its name. (The brand surface itself had been called Astroturf since the 1970s, and dictionary.com dates that literal use to 1970-75.) The practice predates the word by centuries and the internet by decades, but email, form letters and the web made astroturfing cheaper, wider and harder to detect from the late 1990s, with sockpuppets, botnets and paid poster networks; EPFL researchers found about a fifth of global Twitter trends in 2019 were artificially manufactured. Notable cases include Microsoft's 2001 letter-writing campaign during its antitrust case.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- astroturf
- astroturf campaign
- astroturfed
Usage Examples
- The 'citizens' group turned out to be an astroturfing operation funded by the utility company.
- Regulators fined the firm for astroturfing, paying reviewers to pose as ordinary customers.
- A sudden wave of identical letters to the editor is often the tell of an astroturf campaign.