Theresa Neilsen Hayden annotates a piece of astroturf [1].
Making Light: Disinformation:
[ . . . . ] slick, confident, focused, and impersonal, as anonymous as a doorknob that’s been wiped clean of fingerprints. There are no hesitations, no intrusions of personal voice, no traces of specific issues or locations or circumstances. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent staring at high-priced ad copy (less than I have, if you’re lucky), but the stuff is surprisingly hard to write. It’s not a natural style. It has to convey emotion without evidencing the kinds of distortion in the text that strong emotions produce.
[ . . . ]
What I infer is that its creators view their target audience, not as fellow citizens, nor as brothers in arms, but as a bunch of suckers.”
fn1. “synthetic grassroots. Campaigns & Elections magazine defines astroturf as a “grassroots program that involves the instant manufacturing of public support for a point of view in which either uninformed activists are recruited or means of deception are used to recruit them.”