Astroturfing

Fake grassroots. A coordinated campaign disguised as a spontaneous groundswell of ordinary people, named for the fake grass. Online it means bot networks and paid trolls flooding social media to manufacture the sense that ‘everyone’ thinks one way. The anti-Israel surge after October 7 was heavily astroturfed: the analytics firm Cyabra found about one in four accounts in the pro-Hamas discourse, more than 40,000 profiles, were fake, many created a year ahead and switched on when the war began, pushing 300,000+ posts; The New York Times reported the same one-in-four figure and US officials called the volume ‘unprecedented.’ It is neither grassroots nor coincidence but state-driven: Iran’s bot networks went dark the moment Iran’s internet did in the 2025 war; Russia and China amplify through state broadcasters and troll farms; and Qatar bankrolls the wider machine, from Al Jazeera to being the largest foreign donor to US universities, inside a US footprint above $400 billion. The honest caveat: inauthentic networks exist on more than one side, and platforms have removed pro-Israel fake-account operations too, but the documented scale of the post-October-7 anti-Israel operation was in a class of its own.

Read more on the main site: Wikipedia & the conflict