I’ve heard before that in the early days of Reddit u/spez had hundreds of alts he would use to reply to posts to make Reddit seem more popular. I wonder if he occasionally resurrects them to support political arguments he likes or to defend Reddit admins.
That was the rumor, and oddly one he himself confirmed in Reddit comments years back, but he’s since swept that under the rug while he’s trying to sell Reddit, again.
But there have always been so many trolls since IRC and the AOL days, it’s like dealing with flies. Dealing with them usually ends up harming everyone in the long run, but you have to clean it up eventually. The dead giveaway with spez, should’ve been that he defending the trolls.
I think this guy was just someone who’s defunct account had been hacked and used to troll. All of his comments from that day featured a ton of both sides arguments and misrepresented statistics, which to me looked like someone who was given talking points and tried to fix any conversation he could into conforming to them.
It was obviously propaganda, and I guess previously I would have thought someone who ran something ad large as reddit wouldn’t be so stupid and oblivious…but here I am on lemmy a few months later, so who knows. It’s now apparent that spez is that stupid.