The difference between a paid person and an unpaid person may not be so large. I heard from someone who looked into the anti-vax accounts on Facebook (in ~2013,

The difference between a paid person and an unpaid person may not be so large. I heard from someone who looked into the anti-vax accounts on Facebook (in ~2013, when the comments on HN about this news would have been about preserving free speech on Twitter rather than good on them for doing this) that she found some people believed it so strongly that they wrote bots to respond to public messages that use certain keywords. These weren't government sockpuppets, they were concerned citizens. I'm pretty sure this was the podcast where I heard that: https://samharris.org/podcasts/145-information-war/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/145-information-war/ (Relatively near the beginning of where the guest comes into the podcast, if I remember correctly.)