The debate over
Flock cameras in Knoxville, Tennessee, had reached a fever pitch this July when a stay-at-home mom received a text message from a nonprofit group she had never heard of.
The group, Neighbors for Strong Communities, asked Ashley Smith to speak out in support of Flock’s controversial license-plate readers. The nonprofit even offered to use artificial intelligence to help her draft an email to public officials.
There was only one catch: Smith, a mother of four, said she noticed that she would only be supplied with text if she indicated she supported the Flock cameras.
Instead of offering support, Smith dashed off her own email — an outraged missive to her elected officials and a local blog outlining what she saw as an insidious PR campaign.
“If the interests beyond this surveillance technology will work this hard to deceive you to win a vote, what will they do with the database of our every movement?” she said. “A company that manipulates and manufactures fake neighbors is not a company that will honor our data policies, audit logs, or the privacy of the people of Knox County.”
“A company that manipulates and manufactures fake neighbors is not a company that will honor our data policies.”
The text message to Smith revealed little about the Flock campaign’s origins.
As it turns out, the campaign was the product of a “partnership” between Flock and a newly created nonprofit that has used
similar tactics
in support of the controversial proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. Opponents of the merger derided the nonprofit’s work there as corporate “astroturf” — the practice of drumming up
fake grassroots support
.
The combination of texts and AI-generated messages fell short of swaying public officials in Knoxville. Last month, the county commission became the latest municipal body to vote to
cancel the Flock contract
.
In both the Paramount and Flock cases, however, Neighbors for Strong Communities’s wor
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