I'm not the brightest or most well connected of people but I think it's impossible to tell without some serious connections and skills. Intelligence money gets distributed from company to company as purchases/sales for services. In an age where so many businesses dress up the use for their service/product in MBA lingo, it's probably very easy to look like an innocuous company to the outside world when what you're really doing is using data you purchased from reddit to map out ideological trends and see if you can influence those trends with some tool you've developed.

The proliferation of non disclosure agreements being forced on workers in the high income business world makes it even more difficult to tell. you will have your house foreclosed upon if you release info on sketchy shit your employer is doing.

Is every clout-chaser an intelligence asset?

that's the question that makes me take my tin foil hat off, because my answer is no. There are a lot of useful idiots out there. And if we're being honest, there's no shortage of them on 'the left.' There are western MLs out there who repeat pro-Chinese ideas that even the Chinese state would think is too optimistic and bullshit for Chinese workers to buy into. Yet they make good money while doing it.