Why pay for a bunch of TV advertisements when you can pay a bunch of college kids to make posts using specialized sockpuppet software?
An article from Deutschlandfunk describes how “online armies take on defense work and information policy for Elon Musk” via tech blogs and social media.
In addition, Tesla's clean-energy division Tesla Energy is alleged to have a team dedicated to searching for customer complaints on social media and asking them to delete their comments.
A separate team is dedicated to managing negative social media posts aimed specifically at Elon Musk.
Researchers found 186 bot accounts on Twitter that have consistently published positive sentiments about Tesla, which they say “may have buffered the Tesla narrative from an emergent group of critics, relieved downward pressure on the Tesla stock price and amplified pro-Tesla sentiment from the time of the firm's IPO in June 2010 to the end of 2020.”
We should probably lock Elon up.