Whenever Hillary Clinton is accused of being a shady politician, who uses underhanded and unscrupulous methods, her supporters become extremely defensive. They say that all such allegations against Clinton are simply products of the right-wing noise machine, and that if Clinton is seen as venal and conniving it is almost certainly due to sexism rather than anything Clinton has actually done. Longtime Clinton operative David Brock has argued that when you get down to it, all of the scandals and allegations surrounding Clinton are little more than “nothingburgers.” Salon’s Gary Legum says there are simply “credulous people willing to believe any variation of legerdemain, no matter how irrational and absurd, if the name ‘Hillary Clinton’ is attached to it.”

But a new report offers hard evidence that Clinton’s campaign is, in fact, engaged in some of the most underhanded and antidemocratic practices that afflict our political system. In fact, Clinton’s campaign is engaged in precisely the kind of money-driven secrecy and subversion that Democrats have long insisted were wrecking American politics.

According to the Daily Beast, a pro-Clinton SuperPAC called “Correct the Record” has spent $1 million “pushing back against” Bernie Sanders supporters on social media, “addressing” thousands of people on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram. What this amounts to in practice is creating hundreds of fake accounts, which then place campaign propaganda all over the web as if it came from ordinary supporters. This group is spending a fortune unofficially intervening in social media conversations, without other users knowing that the messages are being funded by a SuperPAC.

This practice is known as astroturfing (as in “fake grass-roots”), and it’s long been deployed by the more disreputable corporate marketers. (Versions of it have been used by Big Tobacco, the gas industry, and campaigners against teachers’ unions.) Companies will have astroturfers fill comments sections and social media, pretending to be ordinary members of the community, while they are in fact simply shilling for their employer. As Adam Bienkov of The Guardian defines it, astroturfing is the attempt to create an impression of widespread grassroots support for a policy, individual, or product, where little such support exists. Multiple online identities and fake pressure groups are used to mislead the public into believing that the position of the astroturfer is the commonly held view.