What you are describing is already ongoing. Many comments in eg widely shared Facebook political posts are likely to be posted by bots, or people paid to be rep

What you are describing is already ongoing. Many comments in eg widely shared Facebook political posts are likely to be posted by bots, or people paid to be representing a certain agenda (ie human bots). And in that light I disagree with your “obvious consequence” that people will stop paying attention to forum posts, because we know that people do engage with trolls/bots on Twitter/Facebook/etc. People are also fine watching cable TV for hours, which is content that is entirely designed by people whose intentions we do not know. What fundamental difference does it make whether candidate Doe’s agenda is pushed by bots on forums vs TV anchors paid to read off a teleprompter, when people are so eager to sit in front of it and engage with it? Human attention is the new commodity, and the average person just does not have the means to fight the billions of dollars collectively poured into exploiting their eyeballs.