Crowdturfing, a term derived from “astroturfing”, the practice of masquerading marketing or lobbying campaigns as “grassroots” efforts, is a disguised marketing ploy which uses social media as its medium for operation.
As companies put more focus on social media, crowdturfing is becoming more prevalent.
The practice, dubbed "crowdturfing," is primarily centered in China where hundreds of thousands of workers are being recruited to create fake profiles and post an overwhelming amount of spam on targeted websites in order to sway the perceptions of the general public.
The crowdturfing industry is by no means confined to China; in fact, the United States has seen a recent influx as the social media market continues to grow.
Spam associated with crowdturfing is commonly generated to give falsified product reviews and start rumors.
An influx of site-fluffing can make it extremely difficult to sift through a “sea” of false information; this holds particularly true for less knowledgeable social media users.
The progression of crowdturfing has been facilitated by the exponential growth of social media use and the marketing opportunities that have arisen as a result.
Recommendations from “friends” can significantly increase the sales for a given product. Manufactured endorsements hold ethically grey implications because there is no intrusion upon the social media user without consent; though acquisition of this consent is often obtained through false means.
Due to the fact that this spam is sent by actual persons, the software used to block intrusions sent by bots is ineffective to these unsolicited postings.
This form of cyber fraud does not attempt to acquire financial information from its victims, and has not been viewed as a serious threat to personal security until recently.
The crowdturfing industry is primarily established in China where hundreds of thousands of workers are hired to operate fake profiles. However, the frequency of domestic crowdturfing is a growing concern for US citizens.
Rudimental attempts at crowdturfing often begin by using profile pictures of attractive individuals to gain a higher level of success when adding a friend.
Once this is established the operator can then add friends from their profile, and so forth. This can very easily be combated by not accepting friend requests from unknown profiles, even if they share common friends via the social media domain.
Ultimately, it is not a farfetched notion to assume that automated profiles will be able to specifically target social media users with readily available information.
For instance, a newly generated profile could take form using attributes identical (or related) to those of an already existing profile.
This form of cyber will undoubtedly progress and further obfuscation techniques will be used to increase its effectiveness.
Until software dedicated to stopping the crowdturfing epidemic is developed, understanding the tactics used by these operations will be the most successful approach to eliminate its spread.
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