The three types of political astroturfing you’ll see in 2016

As more and more political discourse has moved to the Internet, the techniques of political "astroturfing" have multiplied. Here are what some of the motivated actors are attempting now:

The bots: There are the bots, for starters — we tend to hear about those a lot. While an analysis by the Atlantic’s Andrew McGill found that there are relatively few Twitter bots among the direct followers of Donald Trump and Clinton, that certainly hasn’t been the case elsewhere. Especially seen in the Brexit vote.
The coordinated posters: That could also be said of what we’ll term the “coordinated posters” — real users who are secretly instructed to share similar political messages on behalf of a campaign or other organization. This isn’t fakery, per se — but it’s also not 100 percent certified organic.
The dark-money memes: viral videos, memes and other apparently amateur political ephemera, which behave like political ads but require very little disclosure.