The first time I came up against this, my thought was that the blogger was someone who was just more cynical about the chances for success and had an opposite point of view from mine. This is understandable and common in research analysis. I wrote a respectful rebuttal to their argument.
I thought that after their rebuttal to my rebuttal, this would end the discussion. We had expressed our opposite points of view, would respectively disagree and move on. This had mainly been my experience in my Wall Street days as an analyst when I disagreed with another analyst. I was wrong.
The situation quickly escalated. In the rebuttal, the blogger accused me of being stupid, deceitful and being paid by the Company to write positive comments.
In this case, over 20 articles were then written in a period of a year. Usually, they were timed to a press release and regardless of the news and without exception each was interpreted as a major negative. A major strategy was to argue that management was lying to investors and manipulating the stock.
The stock would go down on good news, bad news and uncertain news. One of the pillars of stock manipulation is to make good news appear to be bad.
The blogger was indifferent to truth and actually would make up information that was factually incorrect. When made aware that the information was wrong, he/she would ignore it and even repeat it in later blogs.
There are a number of bloggers who participate in these attacks. Many of these bloggers appear to work together and coordinate their negative attacks. It is striking that many of these people have connections to one another. Many of them were trained at a well-known blogging site that was founded by hedge fund people.
Sophisticated use is made of the Internet and social media. Twitter is used to signal that an attack has begun.
Shorts are well connected to mainstream media and are adept at getting them to unwittingly participate in the scheme.
Vicious attacks are launched on writers who might have an opposite but hopefully more well-reasoned and balanced view. The usual line is that they are being paid by management to write positive articles.
Seeking Alpha has become very friendly to articles supporting short selling and is used extensively by the hedge funds. The site actually promotes as one of its favorite authors a person who writes only negative attack article on companies in which he claims that managements are lying and paying authors who have a positive view on the Company. In his disclosure, he states that he shorts stocks, then publishes a negative article on Seeking Alpha and states that he may cover immediately after the article is published. This seems to meet the definition of a pump and dump scheme. He also acknowledges that he is collaborating with other short sellers. I think they contribute the information for most of his articles
Seeking Alpha allows articles to be published by anonymous authors. These articles are often extremely bearish and are almost certainly written by people at hedge funds.
Hedge fund create pseudonyms and publish on a daily basis negative comments on message boards like Yahoo and Ihub.