Astroturfing

One of the tactics is "astroturfing" – or disguising an orchestrated campaign as a spontaneous up-swelling of public opinion.

Hard-right influencer Matt Walsh crystallized a widely espoused view when he credited the song’s ascent to its “raw and authentic” quality at a moment when “everything around us is fake” — a boring trope, to be sure, though not one any more tedious than the insistence of some on the left that “Rich Men’s” virality could only have been the result of some nefarious astroturfing plot.

Before that, Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo funneled millions of dollars into a public relations campaign to aggressively lionize Thomas, astroturfing support and admiration in op-eds, tweets, and websites.

"The election influence and misinformation campaign studied was at least partially based on "astroturfing" i.e. the pushing of inauthentic narratives, with the use of covert accounts posing as real users," the Cazadores report said.

They launched an enormous campaign, bribing, intimidating, astroturfing, lobbying to return the Republicans to total denialism, and they succeeded.