Cory Doctorow at 3:32 pm • 
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Syria's brutal Assad regime has damned few allies left in the world, but one of them, Russia, is governed by a dirty-tricking ruling elite who've made a science out of manipulating Internet opinion. This may explain the weird, stilted pro-Assad astroturf army who appear in any discussion of the regime's atrocities to explain that it's all a Jewish conspiracy.
And on like that. SyriaTribune maintains a YouTube channel stocked with clips from — surprise — Vladimir Putin’s Russia Today portraying Assad as the victim of a bloody-minded western conspiracy. A self-described French intellectual named Thierry Meyssan — author of 9/11 The Big Lie — reveals that TV images purporting to show Assad’s massacres of civilians were prepared by the CIA, along with White House deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, and “aims at demoralizing the Syrians in order to pave the way for a coup d’etat.” The #FakeRevolution hashtag on Instagram provides pictorial, meme-filled boosterism for Bashar, like a screengrab from Time’ app kindly telling user mybubb1e to stop voting for Assad for Person of the Year or Hillary Clinton with flames shooting out of her eyes and ear, courtesy of Bashar4Ever.
Meet the Assadosphere, the Online Defenders of Syria’s Butcher [Spencer Ackerman/Wired]
Homophobic chicken-slingers Chick-Fil-A are reeling in a tempest of bad publicity. First
the Jim Henson company yanked its toys from its stores, then
the mayor of Boston told it that it should set up business elsewhere, and now
a mysterious stranger has begun to astroturf on its behalf on Facebook. Chick-Fil-A says that it has no idea who the person pretending to be a teenage girl who really passionately supports the cause of discrimination against homosexuals is (though I'm sure they appreciate "her" support) -- and for the record, they say that Henson's toys were withdrawn for "safety" reasons.
— Cory
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Cory Doctorow at 12:36 pm • •
@jimmy_pirat (a Twitter account with only one post) snapped a blurrycam picture of a campus employment ad that sought students to pretend to be pro-ACTA and hold up photogenic signs, paying €100 for two hours' work. The recruitment agency named in the ad disavows any involvement with it, and has threatened to sue whomever posted it. I wonder who the hoaxter was?
Copyright Lobby Hires Pro-ACTA Demonstrators
Cory Doctorow at 11:32 am • •
CreativeAmerica is an astroturf group financed by the MPAA that pretends to represent everyday folks who want to see further-reaching, stricter copyrights, and it just happens to be run by a bunch of ex-MPAA staffers. An anonymous tipster claims that the organization has now resorted to paying people to get signups for its membership rolls:
the organization I am doing work for is Creative America, which is a grassroots organization that is working to stop foreign rogue websites from illegally distributing American content such as books, music, films, etc.... These specific websites costs the U.S. and the 2.2 million middle class industry workers $5.5 billion in wages and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Your job would be just collecting signatures from whoever is interested in signing up for updates. A newsletter may come once a month and anyone can unsubscribe if they don’t want it. We don’t care if they do; all I care about is getting initial signups.
The hours are flexible and we will pay you $1/signature, so if you collect 100 signatures a week, we would pay you $100/week. We will also pay for you to go to local film festivals in the area (SXSW, Austin Film Festival, etc.). We are also taking as many people as possible, so if you have some friends who are interested in doing it we can take them as well. Let me know your thoughts....
CreativeAmerica Literally Resorts To Buying Signatures
