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The boring but more likely explanation is that "most addicted" is just a weird statistic that produced weird results.

Eglin has something like 50,000 people but it's actual population as a census designated area is more like 5000.

Oak Brook, IL was also "most addicted" but people didn't run with the idea that McDonalds HQ was running psyops.

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I mean they should. Because corporate influence networks exist just as much as state run ones do.

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There's a Popeye's at Eglin, maybe all that traffic was a chicken sandwich influence campaign?

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I'm not saying those trends charts demonstrate anything, just that commercial human astro-turfers or bot networks are no less of a thing than intelligence ones and it wouldn't really be a conspiracy theory to think McDonalds or any other company, trade association, lobbyist, PR firm etc, is operating a lot of social media accounts that could theoretically show up on a report like that if they were doing a lot of it from a specific place.

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Urm. They almost certainly are though?

It was generally being called astroturfing when it got more apparent on Reddit in the early 2010s, and definitely didn't get less after.

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The point is that a vaguely defined throwaway line on Reddit's blog is not great evidence for either.