Asking publicists, marketing professionals, crisis managers for this comment?

There has been a lot of talk of media manipulation, and astroturfing, and narrative building, etc. I am wondering if there are any crisis managers, social media marketing people, PR professionals, publicists or others who work in entertainment who are able to weigh in on this?

Have you employed similar strategies for your own clients? How common is it to employ bots in campaigns? How legal is it in your region? What strategies would you recommend if one BL or JB was your client?

We have heard from a few lawyers, I thought it would be fun to hear from the publicists this time.