Blake Lively case exposes Hollywood's 'astroturfing' campaigns to manipulate public opinion

At the Met Gala, they're used to stars trying to get attention with what they wear, but Blake Lively's appearance was quite the statement beyond fashion, given how she's just settled on one of Hollywood's most intriguing court cases. It involved what's known as astroturfing. Not fake grass, but a world of fake grassroots support. This was the film which fuelled it all. Lively was directed by her co-star Justin Baldoni for It Ends With Us. Part of the case was Lively claiming she was hit with a coordinated smear campaign to make her look like she was someone who was difficult to work with, to which Baldoni's side argued there was no PR hit job. When lawyers for both sides issued their statement saying it isn't going to trial now, they said for both actors the film is still a source of pride, but it's also brought into focus a rather murky side of PR that's not widely discussed. Astroturfing as a concept isn't new. In fact, it's been around since the 80s. This man, Senator Lloyd Benson, is credited with coming up with the term in response to a load of letters his office received claiming to be from the public, but which turned out to be written by interest groups. He joked they were less grassroots, more astroturf. But nowadays, with the internet, it's taken on a life of its own. From the deliberate creation of fake outrage, coordinated posts, paid influencers, to bots, essentially social media is wide open to being weaponised in all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. You have traditional PR companies, you have marketing companies, all very legitimate, but underneath that, another level of activity by shadowy organisations, by shadowy companies who work underground almost, like an underworld. They may be using bots, they may be using unsavoury software to carry out those activities, and the main aim is not to educate the public, but to manipulate the public. Let's stick with bots, but switch celebrities, and a report by AI-driven behavioural intelligence platform Giddy found that when Taylor Swift released the life of a showgirl, it could trace thousands of posts attacking her to coordinated bot-like accounts falsely suggesting she promoted Nazi ideals. Much of the engagement was from her fans saying that's complete rubbish, but researchers found a tiny fraction of users were basically driving a huge share of the conversation. It's now harder to find something, a narrative, that doesn't have this sort of activity in it, than it is to find one that does. They're using some sort of strategy or tactic on the back end to make sure that information they want you to see gets in front of your eyeballs. In a world where social media outrage might look instant and organic, one thing the Blake Lively case teaches us is that it's getting increasingly hard to know who's pulling which strings and to sort genuine public will from carefully engineered influence. Katie Spencer, Sky News.