TURFTAGGER:Monitoring Paid Political content + Astroturf
Proposal:
Internet Citizen Initiative to tag political content that appears to be Paid Commenting, Astroturf, Sockpuppetry, etc.
The longterm goal is to generate a heightened awareness for questionable content among a wider net than just the users of this tool, who will already be literate, motivated web readers.
With enough momentum, users ultimately establish white lists and black lists that feed a filter tool.
Turftagger Tool:
A browser-based tagging utility that allows a user to screen-grab shady content + filter future content from said content source.
Over time, dedicated users create a dynamically updated white and black list of content sources. The tags feed a filter tool for casual users who choose to opt in. The filter tool is a crowd-sourced stamp of approval or disapproval.
Action:
- User initiates the plug-in tagging utility
- User crops the content area they want into a “screen-grab”
- User enters a short screen-grab title into a text field
- The screen-grab records the page source code, which gets forwarded to a database
- The tag appears in a live feed on Turftagger.org as a small thumbnail + user-generated title, which redirects back to the original URL
- The feed continuously updates to reflect new tag submissions
Users click on tags to:
- visit URL
- vote tags up or down
- begin new discussion threads in the Turftagger forum
