>Must one be an alt-right troll to describe one?
No, but this smells like the journos that in 2016, lurked /pol/ for a few hours and tried to work backwards to form a grand unified theory of Trump's win. Granted, that's more time than I've spent on /pol/, but it strikes me as what Matt Taibbi once called (paraphrasing) the lazy-sportswriter approach to political reporting.
>how is this blatantly obvious to the average user? It's simply not
It's obvious by the standards of internet propaganda campaigns. I'll admit that's not something typical users are even on guard against...
>Pic, bio and subject matter is about as deep as most people would go to identify a Twitter account as belonging to a given person.
Yeah, but the amount of stock people already put into Twitter users has never made any sense, either. I know there is a hypothetical ideal where a Twitter user you don't already know personally can be seen as less suspicious than "random Internet person," but that's not the world we live in. Even verified twitter users doesn't verify anything more than precisely which moron a set of brain-droppings came from. That doesn't make them right, or even make Twitter a useful way to take the temperature of society.
Twitter perpetrates the lie that the platform can be modified to deliver the platform it can never realistically be. Both in the practices of the business named Twitter, and the actions of mass of users that have some of their professional value and/or fame tied to the idea of Twitter managing to find the mythical usefulness and trustworthiness among strangers long assumed to be impossible in large scale (online or IRL).
This is all a meandering tangent about Twitter's place in society, but informs my previous statements about this article.