Astroturfing, fake grassroots communication about a public interest issue, is particularly problematic in this day and age because of the ease of producing it in digital spaces where anonymity and pseudonyms are commonplace. The authors work on two different corpus of writings, focusing on environmental, societal and political challenges as well as disparities in rhetoric and ethos from journalists, politicians, industrial lobbies, scientists and civil society actors. By applying Michel Foucault’s articulation of the ancient concept of parrhesia to digital contexts, the authors theorize the new concept of digital parrhesia. Recalling Barthes, Eco and other semioticians’ works, they also develop a techno-semiotic methodology, implementing this research tradition for digital media and digital writings analysis. On the first hand, with help of a techno-semiotic analysis of numerous institutional and stakeholders texts taking place in European Commission institutional debate, the authors were able to uncover industry astroturfing strategies using the porosity and the flexibility of digital writing to shift the public debate. On the other hand, their work on environmental controversies regarding pesticides and GMOs help them to define digital parrhesia at the light of the so called “Seralini Affair”, and also to identify the different actors’ rhetoric and writings circulating through media in the public sphere. The authors hope that researchers and the public in general can use this approach to better consider online advocacy discourse, which is especially important in light of the disparate nature of today’s writing practices, especially digital writings.