Comment by hadlock

> Do social marketing services maintain armies of bot accounts that just build up credibility by doing normal-ish comments, so they can called on later like sleeper cells for marketing?

Russia and Israel are known to run full time operations doing this for well over a decade. Twitter by their own account, 25% of users are/were bots back in 2015 (their peak user year). Even here on HN if you go look at the most trafficked Israel/Palestine threads, there are lots of people complaining about getting modded into oblivion, turning the conversation into neutral/pro israel, and silencing negative comments via a ghost army of modders.