A tech company claims that anti-vax and anti-lockdown rallies have been ‘astroturfed’. Which means? Well, ‘AstroTurf’ was the world’s first artificial grass, developed for a football stadium in 1966. The verb ‘to astroturf’ means to pretend something is a grass-roots movement when it has been artificially concocted. A campaign tries to look like a widespread grass-roots movement, when, in fact, it is run by a small, but well-organised, group of obsessives.