Public’s vulnerability against abusive practices of communication employed by organizations: limitations for civil monitoring Marcio Simeone Henriques & Daniel Reis Silva simeone@fafich.ufmg.br; daniel.rs@hotmail.com.br Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, MG - CEP 31270-901 - Brasil Abstract The present article reflects on the matter of civil surveillance over abusive practices of communication employed by private organizations, addressing how such practices, focused on an attempt to corrupt public opinion, create a fuzzy category whose monitoring is permeated by obstacles and difficulties. Then specifically explores the practice of astroturfing, understood as a manifestation of a simulated public, reflecting how their logical and dynamics configure an ambiguous and indeterminate practice. Keywords Comunnication in organisations; abusive communication practices; civilian oversight; astroturfing; comunnication monitoring Overview In the last two decades, the emergence of civil initiatives aimed at the surveillance of abusive communication practices employed by private organizations reconfigured ele- ments of the multifaceted relationship between organizations and society, elevating the publics to a central position in the defense of their own interests. In several countries, websites and blogs 1 began to take the form of a network of surveillance radars specifically oriented for monitoring abusive communication practices employed by organizations, producing in that process a large number of denunciations involving some of the world’s largest corporations. At the same time, those actions opened new and exciting research topics for studies on the organizational communication field. In particular, these initia- tives raised questions about who have the role of monitoring organizational communica- tions practices. They also highlight the need of reflection about the unique characteris- tics that underlie such a monitoring process when it deals with ambiguous practices that seek to influence public opinion in a diffuse manner. Reflecting on this topic, Henriques & Silva (2013) point out how the media, in their traditional role of watchdog, are permeated by barriers that restrict its performance on the monitoring of the abusive communication practices engendered by organizations. The emergence of civil initiatives oriented to monitoring such practices denotes a similar 1 Some examples are the PRWatch (www.prwatch.org), the SpinWatch (www.spinwatch.org) and the SourceWatch (www. sourcewatch.org). Comunicação e Sociedade, vol. 26, 2014, pp. 177 – 190 doi: 10.17231/comsoc.26(2014).2032