Pretty sure this has been happening for a long time now. Before AI/automation, they would just hire people in developing countries to manually promote products

Pretty sure this has been happening for a long time now. Before AI/automation, they would just hire people in developing countries to manually promote products on the platform. You can take some steps to mitigate this: for example clicking on the username of people recommending products and seeing if they promote the products more than once or have a history of being active on other unrelated subs. Although they also manipulate that sometimes (purchasing old/actual user accounts), but there's not much else you can do at this point. Even the old word-of-mouth method is more unreliable these days because people just echo what they saw on social media.