It's pretty common to use alt accounts to upvote and comment on your own posts - I used to do this when I cared. Some people take it really far and have their alts also repost their content to get multiple shots to "go viral." Some people also make down vote networks to silence comments they don't like.

Recently, I have used these accounts to get answers to questions: post the question with one account and ~3 bad but assertive answers with other accounts, and that's usually enough to get at least one response from someone who knows the right answer and wants to prove they are smart. All of this can now be done very easily by ChatGPT, too - it used to take effort.

This is the "dark" part of social media marketing that nobody talks about but a lot of people engage in.

Why do you do it?

It's common among trolls, not among the vast majority of users.

Not just trolls, there is a giant incentive for marketers (or even just TikTok-ers) looking to make something visible.

Tons of accounts reposting content from ~2 months ago to create a long, legitimate-looking post history and high karma score. They then use those accounts to complain about Product X or love Product Y -- and they don't look like a shillbot. Ditto for political actors, propagandists, et al.

Trolls, professional marketers, reputation management firms, social media "influencers," and even just social media "power users" who don't rise to the level of "influencer" are all known do this. This is a vast minority of users thanks to the Pareto principle and power laws. However, I suspect that the majority of posts you see on the front page of pretty much every social media app have had some degree of "help" from things like this.

One Reddit user, Unidan, was famously banned for doing this with 12 accounts, and in retrospect, this sort of scheme may have "made" his success - his replies showed up as the top comment a lot (even when they were not insightful) and it got him significant name recognition.

A lot of morally dubious people, maybe.

A SFW way to say "manipulate opinion", I guess.

I think it's a adaptation of "Manufacturing Consent", to sound less rapey. But yes, it's a euphemism for manipulating other people's opinions.

OP is probably confusing it with "Manufacturing consent", a book by Noam Chomsky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Adapting it. "Manufacturing consent" is a good book on the phenomenon, but sounds kind of odd (given how we use the word "consent" today).

The word consent can be used in many contexts, not only sexual. I see nothing odd about it.

Consensus is a different meaning. Going by how odd "a consensus" sounds I would simply assume the writer mixed both or misremembered, and I do not read further intent. Just my opinion.

Oh, I was the OP you are responding to. I don't like the words "manufacturing consent" to refer to astroturfing (Chomsky's book talks a lot more about propaganda as a tool of "top-down" media rather than "bottom-up" media) and neither do a lot of other people who talk about the phenomenon.

See also: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300251234/manufacturing-...

Oh. In that case I must admit you know better what you intended to say :P