I do not believe that the people who were reporting things to Malc via the back-channel would have been shills, Sam, anymore than that the people who were reporting things from here to some other people would have been. Some people just love drama, and other people are just anything from merely righteous believers all the way up to bigots.
With so much information out there -- much if not most of which is contradictory in nature -- there is bound to be polarization, and even though that is actually the intent of The Powers That Be™, when it comes to the people who have been and may still be copying and pasting stuff back and forth, I think that Occam's Razor applies, perhaps even in combination with Hanlon's Razor -- "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."