It is very widely used. It's one of the most cost effective PR strategies out there for some businesses. A good PR person might still be better, a story in a big blog/newspaper affects opinion much more than reddit comments, but if you can manipulate how many shares and comments those stories get you can guarantee more of those stories will get written, especially with modern analytics driven news blogs like BuzzFeed/Gawker/HuffPo).
The term to google for is "Reputation Management", and they will mostly publicly offer services to watch for conversations about your brand and help you take down fake reviews from competitors, which they will present as a huge problem, and do SEO on your press releases. But who did your competitor hire to post all these fake reviews?
It's like the SEO business, they all have some consultants that offer to "motivate and organize your brands fans in order to make their own positive opinions more prominent" or some other BS they can put on an invoice instead of "astroturf the crap out of the important sites with our bot army".
It's now a normal thing to do, like SEO and PR, among insiders it's not ethics that separate white from black hat, it's the risk of your client being exposed and the severity of the blowback. Fake reviews on Yelp/Amazon were the first big business. Giant astroturfing campaigns have become fairly normalized. They work very well and are very cheap. It's easy for sites like reddit or HN to spot a bunch of brand new accounts all spamming similar text, it's very hard to spot the accounts that are all real people, with good english, who are paid to write about mostly whatever they want all day on these sites under a bunch of accounts - who then take a specific position on a specific subject when told to.
I've just come to accept that I won't be able to detect the good ones, no one can. And it's easily available and cheap and effective, so I also assume that the ethics of it won't stop people and so it's probably pretty rife.
Also, "persona management software" is some pretty cool stuff - that's how you remember which political opinions and brand preferences and subculture each of your accounts is supposed to be presenting and managing the appropriate proxy configurations, scheduling posts/comments and so forth.
I know less about the political side of things, as far as I know there is no proof of it being deployed at scale inside the US (except during political campaigns obviously, but for some reason people care less about that and it's always done through a PAC or blamed on a rogue PR firm) but there is a lot of proof of contracts to develop the capability thanks to the HB Gary leaks and the Snowden leaks, and it is being done semi-openly outside the US (where it is legal). Pre-Snowden people doubted the NSA was doing bulk surveillance inside the US, but people in the know assumed they did because there had been other leaks and whistleblowers and they had the motivation and the means. This is where I'd say we are with astroturf propaganda. If it's not being done at scale right now then it's known to not be cost effective.
I actually don't have any expertise in this industry, only familiarity.
When I was young I worked in the "domain industry" (domain squatting and content farms) and you end up meeting really interesting people who work in the grey/black hat SEO/PR/Content/Affiliate Marketing industry.
I've kept in touch with the technical guys I met because they are fun people to drink with and hear crazy stories, most friendly black hat people are, even if the actual industries are pretty awful. I do miss programming against an adversary rather than for friendly potential customers sometimes, I will admit.
It's mostly like you'd expect. The vast majority of work is low skill inexpensive devs just brute forcing things and outrageously crappy PHP libs being bought and sold on forums. There are few startup types using the high skill approach, will actually think to read the relevant computer science papers. They seem to complain a lot that it's so easy that their skills are rarely cost effective, these sites have every incentive to not notice the manipulation, it makes every one of their metrics look better to advertisers and investors.
The technical side is actually more of a support industry compared to the real side of writing and pushing stories to bloggers and news sites. Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying book outlined how it works in general, although I can't say his specifics are true it's nothing I hadn't heard before. That recent New Yorker article "The Virologist" made me laugh pretty hard, those types are everywhere.
HN is a very different place at 2am and 2pm. Take a look through the archives (hn.algolia.com), especially on controversial topics.
In a different context, when security teams are defending against remote attackers, one can sometimes differentiate script kiddies from professionals by timezone of operation.
Automated analysis is challenged by the fact that a single userid can be used by more than one person, and a single person can use more than one userid.
The term to google for is "Reputation Management", and they will mostly publicly offer services to watch for conversations about your brand and help you take down fake reviews from competitors, which they will present as a huge problem, and do SEO on your press releases. But who did your competitor hire to post all these fake reviews?
It's like the SEO business, they all have some consultants that offer to "motivate and organize your brands fans in order to make their own positive opinions more prominent" or some other BS they can put on an invoice instead of "astroturf the crap out of the important sites with our bot army".
Here's an uneven article about the business that links to a lot of good info: http://www.businessinsider.com/reputation-management-2013-12
It's now a normal thing to do, like SEO and PR, among insiders it's not ethics that separate white from black hat, it's the risk of your client being exposed and the severity of the blowback. Fake reviews on Yelp/Amazon were the first big business. Giant astroturfing campaigns have become fairly normalized. They work very well and are very cheap. It's easy for sites like reddit or HN to spot a bunch of brand new accounts all spamming similar text, it's very hard to spot the accounts that are all real people, with good english, who are paid to write about mostly whatever they want all day on these sites under a bunch of accounts - who then take a specific position on a specific subject when told to.
I've just come to accept that I won't be able to detect the good ones, no one can. And it's easily available and cheap and effective, so I also assume that the ethics of it won't stop people and so it's probably pretty rife.
Also, "persona management software" is some pretty cool stuff - that's how you remember which political opinions and brand preferences and subculture each of your accounts is supposed to be presenting and managing the appropriate proxy configurations, scheduling posts/comments and so forth.
I know less about the political side of things, as far as I know there is no proof of it being deployed at scale inside the US (except during political campaigns obviously, but for some reason people care less about that and it's always done through a PAC or blamed on a rogue PR firm) but there is a lot of proof of contracts to develop the capability thanks to the HB Gary leaks and the Snowden leaks, and it is being done semi-openly outside the US (where it is legal). Pre-Snowden people doubted the NSA was doing bulk surveillance inside the US, but people in the know assumed they did because there had been other leaks and whistleblowers and they had the motivation and the means. This is where I'd say we are with astroturf propaganda. If it's not being done at scale right now then it's known to not be cost effective.