They seem to have been trolling The Truth About Cars, around the same time Robert Farago’s infamous (and prescient) “GM Deathwatch” series was really picking up steam. Here’s TTAC contributor Bertel Schmitt:
When I started writing for Thetruthaboutcars.com in 2008, I had access to an automated statistic that told us from which ISP our readers dialed-in. According to the stats, surprisingly many people accessed TTAC from their computer at General Motors. On the list, GM ranked right with AT&T and other biggies. TTAC founder Robert Farago, who was on some kind of a GM crusade, was proud that TTAC was so closely read at GM. GM did not stop at reading though. Some of TTAC’s most prolific commenters were and still are working for GM. Thousands of comments left at TTAC originated at General Motors, and from the same IP numbers as used by GM’s PR department.
I would have never noticed, wouldn’t it have been for a commenter who went by the name of “Jjster6.” Early this year, Jjster6 asked in the commenting section of TTAC whether another contributor had “sand in your vagina or something.” Jjster6 was a friend of robust language. It was time to take away his commenting privileges. The TTAC ban system blocked the IP number also, so care had to be taken not to ban other people who might use the same number. I ran the number, and found hundreds of comments from different people originating from the same number. This is common in large corporations. I ran the number through a service that does what is known as a “reverse DNS.” It showed Jjster6’s IP as being owned by “General Motors Corporation.”
I dug a little further and noticed that over the past years, more than 3,000 comments were posted from just two small subnets of the netblock owned by GM, and then from only a few IPs.
There’s more, all of it damning.
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