Interesting. I was actually joking about HN. I can't think of an example where hangers-on or bots or engagée interest groups have ever been able to sway the popular opinion en masse. Not saying the special interest groups won't take bids from any interested takers or have negligible effect. Luckily for the rest of us, it takes more than a marketing campaign to bring Putin to power or turn the tide against Trump. From my observations, the NYT (and HN) comments are symptomatic of the US popular opinion as of today that looks favorably on mass spying in the face of ISIS or Russia or whatever it is they feel requires the military/special agents to intervene.
There's certainly significant efforts intended to dilute and distract discourse in reddit threads and infiltrating influential moderator positions on the main subreddits.
/r/undelete logs many instances of some of the weirdness.
Check any popular political tweet and you'll likely notice the first or top replies are coming from trolls pushing empty narratives.
