I am fully aware this is what my claim comes down to. Even basic future predictions like more general media interest or talking points leaking into everyday discourse could look the same if thing was legit (or a generic grift).

It's really not hard to hide your tracks from general public - literally just setting up new accounts does the trick. The hard part is having the thing reach the surface, but 1) a lot of things here are also really easy to hide (reddit upvotes and posts from accounts with history are cheap) and 2) if you're doing your job right you don't need a lot of it.

Near impossibility of avoiding both false positives and negatives is a pretty fundamental issue/feature of that kind of activity. I really don't know how I could do more meaningful digging.

Blog posts are really bad tho.