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Comment by h2zizzle | Hacker News Reader

You could also be seeing waves of various astroturf campaigns.

Personally, I don't really think there's a team at Google, nor at OpenAI, paying for "astroturfing" on sites like HN.

What are the rough steps through which you see this working? I see people talking about "astroturfing" all the time without much explanation on the mechanisms. So roughly, there are employees paid solely to post on social media like HN trying to push the needle in one direction or another?

You sound like you're from the Google team ;)

Rough steps:

1. Monitor keywords

2. Jump in to sway conversation

3. Profit

I'm not saying this is happening. Purely hypothetical.

Right, so who's doing the jumping in to sway conversation?

Full disclosure, I am Xoogler, but if anything I think that makes my skepticism even more justified. If there were people there paid to post nice things about Google on HN and Twitter then I'd love to apply for that team!

There doesn't need to be a team. Individuals can act according to personal incentives and still create coordinated behavior. Look at flocks of birds. Each bird acts for itself; together they move in unison.

Sure, but that's not what 'astroturf campaigns' impies.

The top level comment was questioning why sentiment changes so frequently.

I think this is how you induce schizophrenia in yourself, not how you identify secret psyop campaigns organized by private sponsors.

Right, but isn't that just fans being fans?

Usually when I read "astroturfed" I assume there's some higher level coordination involved. I think the flock of birds metaphor is probably a reasonable comparison to the behavior we see on social media all the time - members acting individually on their own self interests in a means which appears coordinated when you zoom out.

This is a great example of a strawman argument. I didn't say anything about teams, or "employees paid solely to post on social media". You injected those details, because you think that they make the idea of an astroturf campaign seem farfetched. But we know that such campaigns happen in other contexts, sponsored by entities with less money to throw around. Why not here? And why do we need to know the mechanics, if all we care about is whether or not it's happening (and maybe, if it's not self-evident, what the goal of such a campaign is)? We don't, really.

Sure, so it sounds like we've got a different idea in mind for what this sort of work would look like. Totally understandable!

In your opinion then, what would a Google-run astroturfing campaign roughly look like? Sounds like this article is an example, right? I'm not asking for insider info, I'm just curious about your mental model on the basic mechanics.

Personally, I think the case "other entities with comparable resources do this, so Google probably does too" isn't super convincing to me. IMO, the null hypothesis "Google has lots of nerdy fans who'll happily post positively about it for free" is a lot reasonable, but perhaps there's something I'm missing.

Yeah... I wish there were laws that would require disclosure of such behavior. Might be tricky to implement though, and probably contradicts the interests of politicians.

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