That's not really what we tend to mean by "paid operatives". Every side's got people clearly being paid to advance some goal, and that's not news, not going away, and not even necessarily a particular problem.
It's the commentary that isn't clear that it's paid, the 300 anonymous comments from different accounts on some news story all expressing some opinion that turn out to be from the same source, that's the real problem.
Whether on average you're dealing with paid operatives is hard to tell. Whether they exist is not; they definitely do. (Honestly, the alternative is just absurd. "There's billions of dollars worth of value sloshing around in Internet forums in setting the opinion and the flow of conversation, but everyone in the world is so very honest that the very idea of forging the signals simply never occurs to anyone, and nobody ever has a reason to try to slant things and is willing and able to pay." Come on. Seriously.) It's the scale that's at issue.
It's the commentary that isn't clear that it's paid, the 300 anonymous comments from different accounts on some news story all expressing some opinion that turn out to be from the same source, that's the real problem.
Whether on average you're dealing with paid operatives is hard to tell. Whether they exist is not; they definitely do. (Honestly, the alternative is just absurd. "There's billions of dollars worth of value sloshing around in Internet forums in setting the opinion and the flow of conversation, but everyone in the world is so very honest that the very idea of forging the signals simply never occurs to anyone, and nobody ever has a reason to try to slant things and is willing and able to pay." Come on. Seriously.) It's the scale that's at issue.