astroturfing works, and is only getting better/worse depending on your point of view. it used to require people to read forums and make posts manually. now, you can automate that with a bot and in multiple languages.
It’s only bad if you value the pittance of social trust people occasionally still afford each other. That’s definitely not as cool as another vacation home and a shiny new gofast boat for some of the few thousand people in this country that actually benefit from this sort of large-scale manipulation.