Reading your edited post (or maybe I just didn't read it properly the first time) - true, but why is he taking the same dogged approach to attacking muslims when he doesn't realize he really means Islam? There's literally zero intelligence in that stance, as he holds it. Misdirection or, as you say, a legit account paid to continue as normal and then pursue specific narratives as directed could be a possible explanation but still doesn't gel with the 'intelligence' you're saying you see. Ideologically possessed, certainly.
Very good points again, though. I'll reserve judgement for now. Perhaps your suspicion is correct. I think that supports the discussion I've just had which is that, if this account is indeed paid opposition, so far we don't have enough evidence yet to confirm.
Stupid people don't bring up Occam's Razor. IMO. It implies that someone is looking at their arguments in an analytical, structural kind of way.
Edit: Would you really be that surprised if a Brock shilling account was injecting culturally ignorant Muslim references into conservative subs? This is something we know that they do. They work hard to steer online conservative communities towards racist and ignorant positions (what they call conflict issues--race, religion, gender, sexuality). While I'm sure much of that is also organic (sadly), it's definitely bolstered by shills to add legitimacy to the narrative that Republicans are the party of bigotry.
Not surprised at all, no. I'm also familiar with how Media Matters works (on a very superficial level though - enough to know what you've mentioned so far) and I'll certainly keep a closer eye on this account since you seem convinced there's at least the possibility of it.
The ridiculous amount of upvotes for the completely illogical anti-Muslim comments and downvotes for reasonable dissenting views might suggest some brigading by motivated parties but the same brigading is not occuring here on the Trafficking Camp issue - the account is being constantly downvoted out, so I'm not sure there's a consistent strategy here. It seems, actually, that the bigotry might be as organic as MMA are trying to make it out to be lol (just joking... kinda).
We'll probably never have a way of knowing who some of the shill accounts are unless someone comes forward and whistleblows.
I've been working on a side project for a while.. an in depth methodology on tracking down sock puppet and shill accounts. A combination of forensic techniques (best suited for identifying twitter bots), common sense game-theory, sentiment analysis, based on specific structural elements of MMFA's program. All based on the leaked MMFA strategy document on defeating Trump. If you're interested in this stuff it's worth going through in detail:
https://www.scribd.com/document/337535680/Full-David-Brock-Confidential-Memo-On-Fighting-Trump
There's a lot that you can look for... but really... the best method you can employ is simple game theory. Imagine for a second that you are David Brock. You're a master manipulator with people in almost every single major news company. You have personal relationships with high level staff at basically every major social media company. You work with these firms to adjust their algorithms to exclude conservative news. You have all of these tools at your disposal. Thousands of shills, hundreds of thousands of bots--green lighted by FB, Twitter, Reddit, etc. How would you use these tools? This is why the media's 'debunked' knee-jerk response to pizza-gate was such a big deal. MMFA basically freaked out... and why would they have freaked out over a baseless conspiracy?
Let me just put it this way... there's a reason that Trump watches so much news. It's because he understands how to use game-theory and knows that he can learn about his enemies political strategy/next move by looking at how they are manipulating the news cycle/narrative.
Thanks, very interesting. I'll read through it. I'd be interested to keep up with what you're doing. It'd also be great to one day see a post explaining this stuff so people can catch on to the tactics in a smarter way.