I think the Trump campaign has a newly-activated enormous army of paid shills manning the comments section of online news sources. I have been spending hours reading news and the comment sections of articles every day since the conventions. Last week when the Trump campaign reset its leadership, it was like someone threw a switch in the world of online commenting. There has been a noticeable, almost unavoidable actually, dramatic increase in a different type of commentary. There's suddenly a lot of long multiple-bullet point very "campaign-like" comments, and a huge increase in philosophical hyperbole that wasn't there a couple weeks ago.
It's a bit like if you spend a long time counting money and then suddenly start to come across counterfeit bills where something is just "off" in the details, or in the quantity of "freshly minted" bills you start to receive. Looking at Trump campaign spending, where an enormous amount went to an "online agency", and also the campaigns former ties to regions where online shenanigans are pretty common, I'm pretty sure we're seeing a very broad and well-financed attempt to shift perceptions of how "average people" are responding to the candidates.
To be clear, it's not that there hasn't been typical partisan back-and-forth all along. Instead it's that there has been a sea change in quantity, quality and consistency of the messages favoring Trump "talking points" all over the place in the last week. There's a change in the language, the depth and, most noticeably, the pervasiveness of a new type of comment. It's bizarre and more than a bit disturbing.
I suspect a lot of people are being paid to create new accounts and comment on political stories. I think it would be very interesting if the media companies paid attention to IP addresses and countries-of-origin for comments.
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