Astroturfing
Disguising an organized campaign — typically paid by a corporation or political group — as spontaneous grassroots support.
The name riffs on AstroTurf, the artificial grass. Astroturfing campaigns generate fake letters to editors, paid social media activity from accounts that pose as ordinary citizens, and front groups with anodyne names that hide their funders. The tells: identical talking points appearing simultaneously across accounts with no organic mutual followers; new accounts that engage only on one issue; "citizens for X" groups with no public membership rolls. The 2024–2026 era of AI-generated content has made astroturfing trivially cheap, which is why platforms increasingly require provenance signals on political content. See also: misinformation, influence operation.