It's rampant, and has been for a long time, in the form of having assistants or such come out and agree, ringers in a crowd and so on. Frankly its actually pretty common to have people in the crowd who know when to applaud or to have people of your own alignment throw out BS outrageous comments you can reply to with a snappy witty reply. Also, I don't really think sock-puppeting to praise your kids performance qualifies as a particularly bad thing, though of course praising yourself is at best an eye-roller




I'd actually guess not that many, and that if its canted to one side it's just whichever side has the most higher-ups who don't type with their pointer fingers or need to call in an aide to give the three finger salute when their computer freezes. Remember, most of our political higher-ups have younger secretaries and assistants and have had for many years, some have gotten kind of proficient with pop tech crap like twitter and facebook but an awful lot of our older power brokers are utterly incompetent with tech, they predate it and its always been easier and more convenient to let some younger aide handle it so that I'd bet there ar emore politicians who have assistants who know their Twitter/FB/email passwords and do most of the posting then there are politicians who have sockpuppets.