I see where you are coming from, and yeah the natural progression of capitalism would certainly tend to lead to outsourcing or automation. I do not know what era Chris was discussing, but I trust him enough to not lie about something like this. It is possible to identify a lot of Turf on Twitter because the account name is literally part of a word or name, usually incomplete, followed by eight random digits. The number of digits never really seems to even change. I would suspect that yes, that is automation (or at least botting to create sock accounts).

NDAs also exist. I mean, video game publishers subject people to this sort of document just for access to early releases for independent review (they aren't even monetarily compensated). I do not think we would need to assume that these far-right 'institutions' compensate workers well, but rather it's more like they enforce their will through fear (revocation of access, etc), power, and their litigious reputations.