Astroturfing via Twitter in Support of “Health Care Reform”?

This is really a brilliant idea, and its essentially a Twitter-based version of the “grass-root” campaign results I found that both supported and opposed proposed FCC rules on “Broadcast Localism” and which resulted in thousands of comments to the FCC web site that were identical to the form letters that different advocate groups urged their supporters to send.

Now to drum up support for health care reform, this blogger has provided easy cut-and-paste Tweets that users can Twitter themselves without having to think of an original thing to say, complete with the bit.ly-shortened URLs to the White House “Reality Check” web pages.
But yet it’s the opponents of current “health care reform” efforts that get accused of astro-turfing this issue when they swap messages and post notices about how and where to voice their concerns.

One thing I’m really just understanding about bit.ly’s url-shortening service is that it will let you track the hits for the web site through ANY bit.ly-shortenered URL, whether yours or someone else’s. So I plugged in those pages and see that he’s apparently had several of his Tweets propagated by as many as two thousand people, but some of the others only have two-three hundred hits. So either folks are being very selective about the dozen or so Tweets he provides. And at the bottom of this post he says this is something similar to what he, and others, I guess, did during the Iran election in July.

Good use of Twitter to get your message out via other people who can’t communicate in 140 characters on their own without help!