Quite a few years ago, Reddit released some report or something stating that an Army Base was America's most active city on Reddit, beating all actual major cities. Of course this was quickly swept away as it showed that the US government was astroturfing social media. I got talking today in consumeproduct.win about an incident in r/politics last year where a botfarm turned on the bots to comment about a democrat debate going on in the wrong thread. HERE.
This got me thinking that this whole thing could be the silver bullet needed to wake people up and get actual legislation moving if it came out that the government is politically astroturfing online with bots.
So wanted to discuss this, what would someone need to do to use the FOIA to get info on the US government's astroturfing operations?
I've read they like to charge for copies if they don't want to give you the info, but know they can't get out of it. So be prepared for it to cost a bit.
Also, think your questions through very thoroughly. They need to be worded in a way that will provide simple information or obvious documents. The requests need to be for "raw" type data, no conclusions, no thinking on the FOIA department's part.
The other trick would be to figure out exactly which agency/agencies would actually have the documents. If you specify the wrong ones, they will just say no such documents.