It is very widely used. It's one of the most cost effective PR strategies out there for some businesses. A good PR person might still be better, a story in a big blog/newspaper affects opinion much more than reddit comments, but if you can manipulate how many shares and comments those stories get you can guarantee more of those stories will get written, especially with modern analytics driven news blogs like BuzzFeed/Gawker/HuffPo).

The term to google for is "Reputation Management", and they will mostly publicly offer services to watch for conversations about your brand and help you take down fake reviews from competitors, which they will present as a huge problem, and do SEO on your press releases. But who did your competitor hire to post all these fake reviews?

It's like the SEO business, they all have some consultants that offer to "motivate and organize your brands fans in order to make their own positive opinions more prominent" or some other BS they can put on an invoice instead of "astroturf the crap out of the important sites with our bot army".

Here's an uneven article about the business that links to a lot of good info: http://www.businessinsider.com/reputation-management-2013-12

It's now a normal thing to do, like SEO and PR, among insiders it's not ethics that separate white from black hat, it's the risk of your client being exposed and the severity of the blowback. Fake reviews on Yelp/Amazon were the first big business. Giant astroturfing campaigns have become fairly normalized. They work very well and are very cheap. It's easy for sites like reddit or HN to spot a bunch of brand new accounts all spamming similar text, it's very hard to spot the accounts that are all real people, with good english, who are paid to write about mostly whatever they want all day on these sites under a bunch of accounts - who then take a specific position on a specific subject when told to.

I've just come to accept that I won't be able to detect the good ones, no one can. And it's easily available and cheap and effective, so I also assume that the ethics of it won't stop people and so it's probably pretty rife.

Also, "persona management software" is some pretty cool stuff - that's how you remember which political opinions and brand preferences and subculture each of your accounts is supposed to be presenting and managing the appropriate proxy configurations, scheduling posts/comments and so forth.

I know less about the political side of things, as far as I know there is no proof of it being deployed at scale inside the US (except during political campaigns obviously, but for some reason people care less about that and it's always done through a PAC or blamed on a rogue PR firm) but there is a lot of proof of contracts to develop the capability thanks to the HB Gary leaks and the Snowden leaks, and it is being done semi-openly outside the US (where it is legal). Pre-Snowden people doubted the NSA was doing bulk surveillance inside the US, but people in the know assumed they did because there had been other leaks and whistleblowers and they had the motivation and the means. This is where I'd say we are with astroturf propaganda. If it's not being done at scale right now then it's known to not be cost effective.