leopetr
Active Member
I'd be careful about reading too much into newspaper comments. They're just as insular as any other forum and they usually don't reflect the general public.
My understanding is that, in some cases, political factions hire paid trolls to fill newspaper comment sections with their brand of insanity. I've seen a Craigslist ad hiring trolls to astroturf newspaper comments for a specific cause, and it fits into what I know about the less ethical side of online marketing.
Also, consider the labour costs difference between places like India and here. Sites like Rentacoder and Amazon Mechanical Turk take advantage of it to link people up with very cheap freelancers. I would imagine that hiring someone from the developing world to spam your political talking points on the Globe and Mail website can be quite cheap, as long as you don't mind non-standard grammar and spelling.
This is not to say that everyone who posts there is fake.