[zamnos]

You should worry about everything you interact with, not just text on some small Internet forum. After all, you could be the star of your own reality-tv Truman Show, and everything you see is made up for the benefit of a TV show that you're the star of, but aren't privity to? How do you know your mom and dad aren't just hired actors along with all the people you interact with? Maybe I'm secretly being paid by producers of a TV show to write this comment to provoke you into discovering the truth of your existence for the season finale?

[midwesternerer]

I think the difference is that the cost of faking my family is extremely high, but the cost of spewing comments on the internet went to basically 0.

I think it is pretty widely accepted that corporations and governments already conduct astroturfing, but those operations were limited in that you had to open an office somewhere and pay people hourly to write propaganda. Now you only need an API key.

I'd be really surprised if there are not conversations happening right now at Facebook and its competitors about injecting generated comments into people's feeds to increase engagement.