Summary

Astroturfing refers to the artificial fabrication of a spontaneous opinion movement on digital platforms, orchestrated by concealed actors (corporations, lobbies, states). Fuelled by generative AI and deepfakes, this practice has reached an unprecedented level of sophistication by 2025, making its detection extremely challenging. On the regulatory front, the French and European legal framework is tightening: the DGCCRF, the ISO 20488 standard, and the Digital Services Act (DSA) create binding transparency and moderation obligations that brands must address. Faced with these reputational and legal risks, companies have concrete tools at their disposal: active social listening, hybrid human/AI moderation, and authentic content policies. Netino, France’s first Marketing Process Outsourcer, operates these tools at an industrial scale to durably protect its clients’ digital environments.

From Artificial Turf to Synthetic Crowds: Anatomy of a Large-Scale Manipulation

Astroturfing takes its name from Astroturf, the artificial grass that mimics natural lawn. Transposed to digital marketing and public communications, the metaphor suggests that an initiative appears to originate from the grassroots, when in reality it is entirely engineered. This phenomenon rests on a fundamental principle: creating the illusion of a spontaneous, mass-driven, bottom-up movement and, by extension, a legitimate one. The mechanism is simple in intent, devastating in effect, and as old as propaganda itself, though it has found in the digital world an unprecedented multiplication ground.

The Operational Forms of Digital Astroturfing

Astroturfing today manifests in multiple, complementary forms. On the web, digital astroturfing consists of mimicking bottom-up civic actions in support of a project, a company, or a cause, through technological devices (sock puppets or click farms) or by recruiting large numbers of paid individuals for that purpose. ‘Sock puppets’ are fictitious accounts created to generate an impression of plurality, while ‘click farms’ deploy real humans paid to mass-produce content on an assembly-line basis. By 2025, the Internet Water Army alone comprises more than 280,000 people paid to flood social media with comments designed to shape public opinion. This industrialisation of manipulation affects markets worldwide. In the e-commerce and retail sectors, the most common form remains the fabrication of fake consumer reviews: in France, ‘dubious reviews’ could account for nearly 45% of all reviews, according to the DGCCRF (the French consumer protection authority), a figure that reveals the systemic scale of the problem, well beyond isolated misconduct.