This is why I don’t hesitate to nuke commenters who show even modest signs of possibly being hasbara, or, in the vernacular, paid trolls:
A majority of online and social media defenders of Obamacare are professionals who are “paid to post,” according to a digital expert.
“Sixty percent of all the posts were made from 100 profiles, posting between the hours of 9 and 5 Pacific Time,” said Michael Brown. “They were paid to post.”
He began investigating it after his criticism of the former president’s health insurance program posted on the Obamacare Facebook page. He was hit hard by digital activists pretending to be regular people. She reports that he evaluated 226,000 pro-Obamacare posts made by 40,000 Facebook profiles.
“Digital activists are paid employees; their purpose is to attack anyone who’s posting something contrary to the view of the page owner wants expressed,” he told Attkisson. “Sixty percent of all the posts were made from 100 profiles, posting between the hours of 9 and 5 Pacific Time.”
Translation: a paid troll will produce 1,356 comments on a single subject. One reason why we don’t see very much of that nonsense here is because the moderators and I operate on the principle that it is better to take out an honest critic than to permit a troll to comment freely.