I mean they should. Because corporate influence networks exist just as much as state run ones do.

There's a Popeye's at Eglin, maybe all that traffic was a chicken sandwich influence campaign?

I'm not saying those trends charts demonstrate anything, just that commercial human astro-turfers or bot networks are no less of a thing than intelligence ones and it wouldn't really be a conspiracy theory to think McDonalds or any other company, trade association, lobbyist, PR firm etc, is operating a lot of social media accounts that could theoretically show up on a report like that if they were doing a lot of it from a specific place.

Urm. They almost certainly are though?

It was generally being called astroturfing when it got more apparent on Reddit in the early 2010s, and definitely didn't get less after.

The point is that a vaguely defined throwaway line on Reddit's blog is not great evidence for either.