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The company is overtly preparing for a big public sale of its shares. As part of that it is conducting press outreach with the goal of talking up how well it is performing.

Seems roughly comparable to a company that's about to launch, say, a new electric car running a campaign to get people talking about how fun it is to drive electric cars. Other than the clear effort to get coverage from journalists, is there really something nefarious going on here?

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Interacting with media / marketing seems to be considered evil on HN. Probably because it's easy to abuse.

It's probably just a case of too many of us having to deal with the day to day struggles imposed by the friendly office marketing dept ;)

Maybe evil was the wrong word to use given the context. My observation is merely that rather than saying "oh, they've been in the news a lot recently" it's now "oh, their marketing department has been working overtime on an astroturfing campaign ahead of a possible IPO"

That is not what "astroturf" means.

"Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by a grassroots participant(s)"

So pushing articles on HN and other outlets doesn't qualify I guess?

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