I will never forget the first time I saw this in action.

The Los Angeles CA area has a subreddit, and very few republican congressmen left. The Democratic party identified one who they could defeat, and decided to work extra hard (spend extra money etc) to defeat this guy.

The subreddit suddenly gets a picture of this Republican, with a title showing unsubstantiated nonsense. It's not even a meme - just a picture of the guy. It's all about the stuff they put in the title, to smear him and get people to vote for the other guy. And from the time I last checked the subreddit (1 am) - no picture posted - to getting into the office (6 am) - the picture has the most upvotes of all time in the subreddit.

It was clearly a phony account getting mass machine upvotes, but it got people super riled up about the congressman and tons of comments from regular posters. Nobody wanted to hear me when I said "Hey something's wrong here".

Same thing OP is mentioning, but this is literally politics.