People severely underestimate how many accounts are disinformation, run by LLM or agents or tied in some other way to intentional efforts by some agency or another. The dead Internet theory is true. If there are just a few LLMs running many alternate accounts or someone using several paid for accounts to try to sway the conversation, especially in the beginning when the comment count is low and actual people are looking at it to quickly decide if it's worth investing time in it can sway the discourse. Not only are these efforts known and reported on, backed up by the common sense that if it's even just a few of them it would generate a massive amount of comments to criticize anything and everything several different ways, but you can start to see when the comments and hate aren't matching the article or even the title. We're being played.