Read the Krebs link. Follow the Florida guy's phone number...

Did you even read the links I posted?

Your reddit link includes photos of real people at a demonstration. Astro-turfing wouldn't produce that, unless they were paid actors.

Astroturfing influences other peoples behaviour - that's the whole point.

In that case, it seems a little trickier to distinguish astroturfing vs. something I just personally do not agree with.

I read the links, and like I said in the original comment, I think it's very disingenuous to equate "national political organization with real human supporters" with "artificial or paid shills"

You could use that logic to brand the ACLU or other civil rights organizations "astroturfers", because they are trying to coordinate or bootstrap local movements. Do you think that Black Lives Matter protests have to independently, randomly coalesce in cities for them to be real movements? Obviously not. Social change is hard, and claiming "oh, but there's someone out-of-state helping them organize" is just a cheap way to invalidate any protest you don't like.

It's no better than Putin branding all NGOs as "foreign agents", to trash any civil society the Kremlin doesn't like. We can do better.