Astroturfing, Dr. Evil, and N.Y.C.’s Elite Schools

Last week, The New York Post published an exclusive article, by investigative reporter Dana Kennedy, about 3 groups of anonymous concerned parents who “plan to troll elite NYC schools with anti-woke billboards.” The Post named one of the groups as “Prep School Accountability” and linked to their website. Prep School Accountability, or PSA, wants to be seen as a grassroots effort of concerned parents, but appears to be anything but. Rather than being actual grassroots, organized bottom up, it appears to be astroturfing, the term for fake grassroots organizations that are actually built out by experienced political operatives and made to look authentic.

The home page for Prep School Accountability is overly polished and includes a series of links to news stories about private NYC schools offering “Woke” or “Critical Race Theory” and parents’ responses. Underneath the news is a section of resources with a who’s who of conservative activists on blocking “Critical Race Theory” from schools, and a list of organizations Prep School Accountability claims no affiliation with but encourages parents concerned about their kids learning critical race theory to reach out to.

The front page is, like all websites, code displayed as text and images and that same code reveals who was involved in building out the site. As websites became more and more complex content management systems, or CMS, software that allows anyone to easily manage pages and themes with little coding ability became commonplace. The Prep School Accountability page is running on avery common CMS known as Wordpress and Wordpress by default creates a user page for each author of a Wordpress website. There are ways to hide those author pages but the people behind PSA failed to do so properly. Simply adding ?author=# to the end of the URL and iterating the number shows the authors.

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