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Certainly we've seen Amazon shutting down reviews for Rings of Power with the excuse that "bad people are reviewbombing the show because they're racist and sexist and homophobic", and they own iMDB so they were able to put their thumb on the scale there. Rotten Tomatoes did a different rating based on if you clicked on the "verified audience/critics" versus "all audience/critics" for The Little Mermaid, where one was favourable and the other was unfavourable.
So if the big corporations have shown that they are both willing and able to filter reviews, and commercial outlets go along with them (because if your film critic gives them a negative review they'll pull advertising, so you better give a good review), I suppose there isn't any reason to think they wouldn't set up astroturf sites.
Absolutly and also if you look at the positive review texts they are sometimes just copy paste with "bot like" username. Sometimes even getting simple things wrong about the movie. But the thing about reddit is that you can look at the users history and see that they are behaving suspiciosly either being straight up activists and not actually discussing having good faith discussion or defend the billion dollar companies go from little mermaid to strange worlds to elements defeding the trash and never showing up in activist circles. Back in the day a powermod punished me with a short term ban because I called out an obvious paid shill on a subreddit, like that was going to convince me that it wasn't astroturf.
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