What you are describing is how social media marketing works - for both politics and business (aka Astroturfing - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/what-i... ).
One of my friend works for an advertising company who specialises in social media marketing. Their clients have a budget of 100,000 to 250,000 per month for only hiring people to post on social networks! The job includes identifying all negative posts about the company or its product or business model, and to politely rebut it and offer the company's point of view. Or to just plainly promote the product / services / company on the social media platform to create a buzz. Unethical social media marketers go beyond this - their job includes creating and supporting a negative campaign against their client's competitors.
As the former Google CEO said, social media works like an "amplifier for idiots". I'd rather not comment on whether we are all idiots here, but I am sure none of us can deny the "amplifying" effect of a message here on HN or other social media platforms.
I don't think the guidelines are meant to ban all discussion of astroturfing in general as a marketing tool.
But my opinion is the exact opposite, Apple is not getting a penny of mine until they give their users the freedom that they deserve. General purpose computing devices should allow people to compute generally, without the blessing of some corporate deity.
Really? I feel like there's more support for locked-down hardware, proprietary software, devices where the owner doesn't get as much access or control as the manufacturer, etc., on HN now than there was in the past. I feel like a decade ago it was fairly common conventional wisdom among HN readers that you ought to have root on your devices, that jailbreaking or reverse engineering restricted devices is actively good, that the trends toward less owner control are alarming, etc.