Power Workers Union Rethinking "Social Media" Campaign?

Both their fake blogs, Enviralment and Envirogy are "undergoing scheduled maintenance".  We'll see for how long, and what comes out the other side.

Background here.

h/t Scott in the comments.

Trolls R Us, Part III

The Torontoist caught up with them. An excerpt:

First time orhganizing something this big. I have helped with previous volunteer posting on a municipal level. We are upping the anti now to ensure consistant reponses to some of the garbage that passes for balanced news coverage. It’s not that hard to organize once we have the right writers lined up. Most are assigned a specific media outlet: Toronto Star, G&M, CBC, ect. They create one or more accounts and just ride each news item until its dead.. The dif this time is we have a little ediorial overview. Volunteer posters sometimes they get side tracked or flame out and get banned from posting.

Sounds plausible enough.  As someone notes in the comments, sounds like Mr. Kouvalis.

On Astroturfing

For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organized by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to “manipulate the medium”. This is what he told them:

“Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books”. I go through and I say “one star, one star, one star”. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare”, I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. … If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.”

Nice To See That "The Left" Can Do Astroturf Too

That is all.