This is not real grass. And that's not a real comment, either.
Most stories written about online crowdsourcing
discuss the philanthropic aspects of people around the world pitching in on a task, like helping out in a study
or identifying photographed objects for the blind
. Sure, the microtasks are usually tedious, but they need humans to do them and they provide an income stream, albeit a small one, to people who have no other way to make a livelihood. It's all good, right? Well, as it turns out, there are other, darker tasks that only humans can do. Specifically, writing spam comments, participating in online discussions to promote brands, making new social media profiles specifically to skew the conversation on a particular topic, and other, similar practices that UC Santa Barbara professor Ben Zhao calls "crowdturfing." (That's a portmanteau of "crowdsourcing" and "astroturfing
," the process of faking grassroots ...
