Wiki:

Astroturfing is a word in English describing formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous “grassroots” behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf.

Facesofcoal.org, a pro-coal mining (and burning) industry advocacy group, gets busted using stock photography to represent it’s ‘members’ by the people who live on top of the coal …

Facesofcoal.org gets busted as a creation of D.C. spin-house Adfero…

Adfero gets busted for cutting corners and turning it’s grassroots movement into something more..weedy, but they do show some decent use of javascript for image captions, I guess… (Is that fair and balanced ?)

Appalachian Voices has more info.