The webbot spyders go out to thousands and thousands of peer to peer forums (some excluded, particularly when it becomes evident that they are replaying data from previous reports, to prevent them from being self referential) - garden forums, cement users forums, cat forums, Russian forums, Polish forums, Polynesian forums, all kinds of forums. What they look for is shifts in language of the forum members.
I think TPTB can TRY to control it, but I doubt, given the volume of the work, that they can actually do so.
I think most of mankind lives in negativity so much of the time that TPTB don't have to worry about influencing it.
alys