YES you hit a lot of great points here.
I can tell you that Cass Sunstein is a cognitive infiltrator that has his shill army infiltrate the 9/11 truth movement. Also They hyped up the whole "flat earth" B.S which has been debunked, but shills aren't interested in truth or facts - only discrediting their opponents.
Watch out for the shills posing as representatives of other groups like for example - fake Christians. A shill will use a religious userpic (cross or Jesus or sky) and their username will contain some word affiliated with Christians (Jesus, God, Repent, Holy spirit, etc) and will always quote Bible versus.
I bring this up because they were the ones mostly used to push "flat earth" claiming the bible explicitly says the world is flat. I checked with some Christians I knew and others in truth movement and well apart from their shock they told me it doesn't say that. I double checked too, it seems to be taken out of context. It is pretty easy to pose as religious groups when one only has to do that and grab religious quotes from the search engine.

Other signs to watch out for is;

• Mass astroturfing, spam
• Voting content down in large numbers
• Mass flagging people's comments or content
• virtue signaling to gain popularity and followers/subs/likes
• Mental gymnastics, reverse psychology
• Groupthink, and sometime they hold doublethink
• gaslighting, to confuse you and distract and frustrate and make you question your own beliefs
• Repetition. Repeating the same thing everywhere all over a website or affiliated websites, they really keep themselves busy, with their sock puppets
• usually dont put a lot of effort in their user profiles, they count on the naive and ignorant to take what they say and not bother to check if they are legit, sadly this happens a lot. Confirmation bias will do that.

They also tend to gather at popular places that have a lot of people to push their narrative on, like popular channels on youtube - pop culture and trending topics, social media like Tumblr because the youth are there and this is mainly to use entertainment as a trojan horse for political bias topics because the youth aren't going to be to invested in the news, so shills will push it through art, film, music, tv ,gaming reviews and essays.

I'm in the tinfoil hat circles.... I've dealt with plenty of these online vermin.