This is a topic which hasn't received enough attention. Astroturfing is probably a bigger issue than most people realize. When one side does this on a large scale, the other side will need to do the same thing in order to compete. The potential end result is people end up with someone elected to office because some PR strategist cooked up a bigger crock of slop than the other side.
Using a right example, this video will be analyzed.
The channel this video comes from has 200,000,000 views, and pitches itself as comedy. There isn't any explicit advertising in the videos. The channel has about 2500 consistently right-based videos. The creator appears to be a single person. One to two short (not shorts) videos are produced daily.
This video is about a party/pool party happening at a short term rental. Just about all the people attending were Black. Anyone could organize something like this and target specific demographics as participants.
Looking at the comments section, just about all the comments have distinct, biased patterns. There's an abundance of racist comments. Regardless of the reasons for the video, this means votes. It boils down to votes, money and power.
This could just be a normal video, but looking at it the other way reveals the potential dynamics. Someone could pay a few people to engage in this behavior. First of all, this situation in this area is very unusual. There's more views than the population on the island. Looking at the comments, there's an excessive level of racial content. This gets into "get tough on crime" things, and there's comments about gun rights. This affects tourism, so local business owners could be persuaded to vote a different way. Property owners might be influenced because of property values.
