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Astroturfing Is Illuminated: Site Launched to Expose Front Groups
This week, the Consumers Reports WebWatch and the Center for Media and Democracy launched Full Frontal Scrutiny, a site to "expose front groups, which are organizations that state a particular agenda, while hiding or obscuring their identity, membership or sponsorship, or all three."
The new site will focus on consumer-related topics: health, personal finance, electronics and Internet, automotive, home, environment, and travel, so as not to overlap the Center for Media and Democracy's political directory wiki SourceWatch. (Note: The 'wiki' tab on the Full Frontal Scrutiny site takes users to the SourceWatch open wiki page on political and consumer-related front groups.)
Recent blog entries focus on Wikipedia edits from questionable sources (Full Frontal Scrutiny recommends WikiScanner, which links anonymous Wikipedia edits to "interesting organizations") and Wal-Mart's decision "to bring the front group [Working Families For Wal-Mart] in-house."
Users can search the site, submit a tip, register to edit the SourceWatch wiki, and leave comments.
How do you think front groups should be catalogued and discussed online?
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Why not aggregate Wikipedia content?
I'm just wondering why the group couldn't aggregate Wikipedia content on each group instead of creating completely separate profiles for each. They could comment on each for further context, but it seems a little redundant.
Excellent resource, however - thank you.