A:
Hahaha! I’d never heard that term before! I looked it up quickly. It’s a combination of “crowdsourcing” (where many people do little bits of work to get a large job done quickly or many people contribute small sums of money) and “astroturfing” which is apparently “a fake grassroots movement”. I’ll explain that because it is all very colloquial. AstroTurf is fake grass that they use in indoor sports arenas and other places where grass won’t grow (it was named after the old domed stadium in Houston Texas, the Astrodome). “Grass roots” is a term used to mean support for something (like a project, a law or a political candidate) that begins very small and organically among common people, instead of with a big organization or a leader). So in the text “crowdturfers” are people who pretend to be individuals who independently support an idea (like community members who try to raise money to improve the playground at their local school or something) when really they are being paid to write positive tweets or reviews.
I learned something too! :-)