I think we also expect editors to be acting in good faith, though. The consensus in this case isn't reached because of an inevitable difference of opinion; one side has been paid to take his position. It's essentially astroturfing.

Being paid is not the same as acting in bad faith. Being paid is one potential source of bias, and happens to be one that is strong and particularly easy to objectively define (as opposed to, say, bias from one's political opinions). Everyone is biased, but some people at some times are acting in good faith despite their biases.

The point of my comment is that you can't divide the world up into biased and unbiased, label the biased part astroturfing (or whatever), prohibit it, and then expect a nice unbiased outcome. Rather, everyone is biased in their own ways and to varying degrees. The good outcome come from the truth-tracking aspects of the process, not from have unbiased inputs.

I'm not labeling his actions astroturfing because he's biased, I'm doing so because his bias is paid for and undisclosed. That's a textbook definition of both astroturfing and acting in bad faith. How is this different in any way from e.g. a company paying for reviews on Amazon, or a journalist writing a glowing article about a company without disclosing that they own stock in that company?

> I'm not labeling his actions astroturfing because he's biased, I'm doing so because his bias is paid for...

I understand that, but I'm arguing that the bias from financial incentives are just one form of bias. (That's why I said "or whatever".) I mean that it's not useful to divide the world up into no/negligible bias and bad/paid bias, regardless of what you call it.

> ...and undisclosed. That's a textbook definition of both astroturfing and acting in bad faith.

In fact, as stated in the article, the payments were disclosed. Do you have other reasons to think he's acting in bad faith, or just your mistaken belief that the payments were undisclosed?

Whoops, I missed that part! I agree with you, then: he's not acting in bad faith.