Creating or amplifying the appearance of widespread support — through fake reviews, coordinated testimonials, bot-driven engagement, or astroturfing campaigns — to exploit the human instinct to follow apparent consensus.
In 2012, Samsung Taiwan was caught using employees to post anonymous positive reviews of its smartphones and negative reviews of competitor HTC across online forums. The reviews were indistinguishable from genuine customer opinions. Similarly, third-party services sell packages of 50 Amazon reviews for $999.
Social proof is one of the most powerful heuristics humans use. "If thousands of people think this is good, it probably is" is a reasonable shortcut most of the time — which is exactly what makes it exploitable. The brain doesn't flag manufactured consensus because the signal looks identical to real consensus.
Watch for sudden review surges, uniformly enthusiastic testimonials without specific detail, celebrity or "expert" endorsements with undisclosed sponsorship, and language that reads as written rather than spontaneous.