This was discussed years ago, but it's been a reality for a long while. There are articles dating back to 2007 kind of dabbling into this, and I remember years ago a whistleblower, I think she was a journalist employed by one of these companies, and if I recall did a TED talk exposing a commercial enterprise built to both whitewash and smear people, and probably companies alongside it. One of their mediums was Wikipedia. Maybe someone here has a better recollection of it than I do?

But yeah, I don't see that this is novel. There's been both the architecture and the motivation for individual, commercial, and political disinformation since the inception of language. The rise in scale isn't even that alarming, they're probably actually just uncovering activity that started long ago, I mean this is just radical PR or propaganda, which has been around unobserved for centuries. I'd readily agree that the pre-liberal Catholic church, and the clergy under it, were staked so highly in justifying Divine Right that it became a sort of disinformation that had the added benefit of lining the pockets of the Pope down to the parishioner. Dumas and Hugo both had asides in their books, Monte Cristo and Hunchback respectively, both of which expounded that truth is fickle. And if Hugo was being intellectually honest, he had reason to believe that even in the 15th century Paris was rife with disinformation.

It's good to see these sort of things published from time to time, maybe it will breed some more skeptics, but mostly it'll be a talking point.