To be fair, the right-wing, generously-proportioned, gun-totting, anti-vaxor, conspiracy-nuts don’t take much to fool, but ironically they have failed to see how someone is manipulating them using astro-turfing. Our favourite was the Apple fanboy (pictured) who took part wearing a mask in case he caught the illness that he claimed did not exist.
For those who came in late, Astro-turfing is a move by corporate or political interests to create the illusion of a grass roots campaign by setting up bogus websites.
Security expert Brian Krebs a spike in the new domain registrations beginning with the word “reopen” and ending with US city or state names have been registered.
The largest number of them were created hours after President Trump sent a series tweets entirely of caps urging citizens to “liberate” themselves from new gun control measures and state leaders who’ve enacted strict social distancing restrictions in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
KrebsOnSecurity believed that these “reopen” sites were engaged in astroturfing, which involves masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants.
For example reopenmn.com, reopenpa.com, and reopenva.com were tied to various gun rights groups in those states. Their registrations have coincided with demonstrations in Minnesota, California and Tennessee where people showed up to protest quarantine restrictions over the past few days.
KrebsOnSecurity ran a domain search report at DomainTools requesting any and all domains registered in the past month that begin with “reopen” and end in “.com.”
Out of 150 domains; in addition to those named after the individual 50 states, some of the domains refer to large American cities or counties, and others to more general concepts, such as “reopeningchurch.com” or “reopenamericanbusiness.com.”
Most of the domains are leading to parked pages and registration records obscured behind privacy protection services. But a review of other details about these domains suggests a majority of them are tied to various gun rights groups, state Republican Party organizations, and conservative think tanks, religious and advocacy groups.
But what is telling is that they are being groomed for later use. One site reopenpa.com was registered to a Florida resident and currently forwards to the Pennsylvania Firearms Association, and urges the state’s residents to contact their governor about easing the COVID-19 restrictions.
Reopenpa.com is tied to a Facebook page called Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine, which sought to organise an “Operation Gridlock” protest at noon today in Pennsylvania among its 68,000 members.
Both the Minnesota and Pennsylvania gun advocacy sites include the same Google Analytics tracker in their source code: UA-60996284. A cursory Internet search on that code shows it also is present on reopentexasnow.com, reopenwi.com and reopeniowa.com.
More importantly, the same code shows up on a number of other anti-gun control sites registered by the Dorr Brothers, real-life brothers who have created nonprofits (in name only) across dozens of states that are so extreme in their stance they make the National Rifle Association look liberal.
Many of the reopen sites that have redacted names and other information about their registrants nevertheless hold other clues, based on precisely when they were registered. Each domain registration record includes a date and timestamp down to the second that the domain was registered. By grouping the timestamps for domains that have obfuscated registration details and comparing them to domains that do include ownership data, we can infer more information.
The motivation for the astro-turfing is clear. The gun groups are worried about people not buying so many guns, the right-wing politicians want businesses to open so they can start making money again. The only downside of this is that some people are going will die. Fortunately, if the astro-turfing target is effect they will be the sorts of people who have been lowering the standard of the gene-pool for a while.