Google astroturfing... it’s a huge industry. Not a made up conspiracy theory. It’s as benign as a filing thousands of individual orders with different book stores to get a new author listed on the NYTimes best seller list and as malicious as making up fake personalities to promote obvious lies. Public relations, public affairs, and marketing companies are heavily involved.

Here is an interesting study from a couple years back about astroturfing reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock...

I'm not disagreeing with you dude, just running with your "downright paranoia inducing" comment ... never mind ...