Astroturfing
Staging a grassroots movement that doesn't exist. The name comes from the AstroTurf brand — fake grass. The client is a company, a campaign or a state; the voices are made to look like ordinary people.
The forms vary: paid commenters, sockpuppet accounts supporting one another, purchased reviews, coordinated letters to the editor with suspiciously similar phrasing, automated accounts amplifying a hashtag until it trends. The goal is rarely to convince the attentive reader but to create the impression that an opinion is widespread — and to make anyone who disagrees believe they're alone. It's detected through patterns rather than content: accounts created in the same week, activity following office hours in the wrong time zone, identical phrasing. Generative AI has made textual variation cheap, which has pushed detection toward behavioural and network analysis.