[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.