20 years ago I was made aware of gurella marketing people who were paid to have 'organic conversations' in public places about products they were promoting!
I dated a woman that had a job of managing fake social media profiles. She worked for a marketing company, but the whole point of her department was to do shadow PR.
Step one was get (sometimes a purchase, sometimes AI, etc...) a lot of pictures or same person.
Step two was create the basic "character" based on the pictures.
Step three was make posts, sometimes automated, sometimes manually, using the pictures and any appropriate content. This Step can last years and goal is create a internet presence that looks like a real person.
Final possible steps:
1. If character became famous enough, could be sold to an influencer or corporation to manage that profile and do whatever they wanted.
2. If wasn't sold, it was used often to generate legitimacy for other fake profiles.
3. The real cash cow: during PR emergencies those profiles would be used to direct the narrative, for example she told me her last work like that was using these profiles to make content go viral to distract the public from negative news that were viralizing about one of the world biggest appliances manufacturer. She said in 24 hours people were all over paying attention to the new "viral" post and forgot the news entirely and the company didn't even had to make a statement.
Tons of people who are actually paid to go through conversation scripts, push narratives, etc.