The Sunstein-Vermeule paper can be downloaded from this page. (Look for a link near the top of that page that says "Download".)
In it, on page 14, the authors do indeed put among their ideas this: "(4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech." On pages 21 through 23, they develop ideas on how to use this "counterspeech" to create "cognitive infiltration."
This might explain the improved quality of trolls that we have seen recently. Instead of the rife misspellings that usually mark the breed and absurd attempts to rile fellow posters, these posters are generally more articulate. Perhaps the single most interesting attribute is that they are highly repetitive; I have to assume that this is because they are following scripts provided to them. Also, they have a tendency to gang together and provide explicit echoing of their agreement with each other.
It is particularly interesting to watch a flock of them descend on a thread dealing with new news, and particularly so when the flock is delayed --- perhaps because they need some new scripting to handle a new situation?
I get the feeling that sometimes they are use AI scripting programs. When you hit them with something very unusual, they appear to just lock up. Have not personally seen them myself in a while, but I have been staying off the political threads.
Yep -- there's a lot stimulus money to be passed around and a lot of "cognitive infiltration" to stimulate.