'astroturfing'
thinking about the possibility of manipulated search engine results, and excessively downvoted things in the El Reg forum... yeah, it's possible, but I don't think it's very effective.
Now, the BLATANT filtering of news stories as "current" or "interesting" by facebook staff... that's probably MORE effective at keeping bad news about Win-10-nic (particularly successful small claims court cases against them) out of the view of the general population.
it makes for a nice conspiracy theory, and probably IS happening, but yeah I think it has limited effectiveness. But I've noticed the downvote 'howler monkey' "apparent campaign" responses, too.
Astroturfing: artificial campaign designed to LOOK like 'grass roots', but isn't. Usually done to boost up a very minority opinion to make it look 'majority', often to demoralize and/or discourage opposition response which would OTHERWISE succeed... Hey, didn't something like that happen a few days ago in the U.K. ??? Except it didn't work.