“Someone Paid Thousands Of Foreigners 20 Cents Each To Hide HuffPost’s Negative Coverage Of A Democratic PAC”

HuffPost:

HuffPost’s April 2016 report investigated the tactics of End Citizens United, a political action committee founded by three former staffers at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s official organ dedicated to electing Democrats to the House of Representatives. ECU, which worked to elect Democratic candidates who support campaign finance reform, used aggressive and expansive email campaigns to rake in millions of dollars in online donations. The PAC’s pushy tactics angered other nonprofits working toward campaign finance reform, which came to think of the PAC as an arm of the Democratic Party stealing their donors with deceptive email marketing.

Until this spring, HuffPost’s story was the second to come up in a generic Google search for “End Citizens United.” But in the spring of 2018, an anonymous U.S.-based contractor paid at least 3,800 workers in countries around the world through the crowdsourcing firm Microworkers to manipulate what stories would come up when people searched for the PAC in Google. The contractor paid each of the workers 20 cents to click on stories and sites that portrayed the PAC positively, bumping those stories up in Google at the expense of critical coverage. HuffPost’s story dropped from the second place on the first page of the Google search to the second page of search results.

End Citizens United did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment before publication.

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