Even more insidious is the armies of salaried mechanical turks on 'grass root' social groups and forums pushing forward a company's whisper campaign without any form of disclosure. You'll notice the same messages surfacing in various online avenues of certain niches nearly at the same time. They make people believe they are on the inside lane of something new and count on them spreading the 'insight' organically amongst their other circles, but it's pure planned guerilla marketing. Most I've noticed this in nutrition, healthcare and financial products.
As a moderator of a major technical community on Reddit, I (and the other mods) probably spend more effort on squashing astroturfing campaigns than anything else related to moderation. Removing astroturf posts and banning associated accounts is a daily task. Some vendors are so aggressive about this that we've had to institute automod rules to nuke any post that includes certain brand or product names.
Thankfully most vendors or their marketing agency affiliates that engage in this sort of thing aren't particularly clever about it, so identification of puppet accounts to ban isn't too difficult.
I'm convinced that this is why every recipe on Youtube now suddenly involves "delicious" Almond milk (which is not delicious and not milk).
If you are going to be shilling for the vegan processed food industry, at least use oat milk (which you can make at home) or soy milk (which is actually delicious - at least the processed versions I had in Japan).
Almond marketing is totally insane. I think it's because they feel they have to fight against all the people who point out how environmentally bad they are. It's hard to blame the people in CA who are upset when they're constantly asked to ration their personal water usage while the almond industry there takes more water than all the indoor water use of the entire state.
Yes, I have the exact same feeling. Literally extracting water from an area dealing with drought; it feels icky and not environmentally conscious at all.
