“Almost never,” except when you are. For example, Milo. All over social media for a good long while, along with staffers, until the money behind him dried up.
That's not really what we tend to mean by "paid operatives". Every side's got people clearly being paid to advance some goal, and that's not news, not going away, and not even necessarily a particular problem.
It's the commentary that isn't clear that it's paid, the 300 anonymous comments from different accounts on some news story all expressing some opinion that turn out to be from the same source, that's the real problem.
Whether on average you're dealing with paid operatives is hard to tell. Whether they exist is not; they definitely do. (Honestly, the alternative is just absurd. "There's billions of dollars worth of value sloshing around in Internet forums in setting the opinion and the flow of conversation, but everyone in the world is so very honest that the very idea of forging the signals simply never occurs to anyone, and nobody ever has a reason to try to slant things and is willing and able to pay." Come on. Seriously.) It's the scale that's at issue.
Indeed. Perhaps people aren't arguing with paid operatives directly, but there are a lot of people repeating positions that were injected into the dialogue by paid operatives.
This is definitely the case. Most of the repeaters are incapable of following through or supporting the argument (in most cases, not even the original promulgator could follow through in a rational discussion), and they have exactly one response: change the subject with another non-sequitur. It is a mistake to follow them into the change of subject, and the charity principle doesn't ask you to do so, as they have by then revealed their true intentions.
> Indeed. Perhaps people aren't arguing with paid operatives directly, but there are a lot of people repeating positions that were injected into the dialogue by paid operatives.
The term for them is "useful idiots." But you definitely shouldn't engage with them like they are bad-faith actors, because often they're good-faith actors who've been mislead.
