You're right, total false equivalence. Plain clothes thugs hired or forced to show up in person, and you can assume plain clothes users are hired or forced to comment online too.
It's how they stay in power, a living army ready to deploy for anything that makes them look bad.
Sure I'd do the same for my country, but the difference is I am not forced to do it. I choose to defend our values while earning a decent living.
Let me stop you, right there. No, we're not.
This is what happens when you're Chinese and you try to run for local elections as an independent not endorsed by the Communist party:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1HdCIW2Xtk
In America and by extension the West, there is nothing comparable to this going on.
There is absolutely no moral equivalency between the brutal dictatorship of China and Western plural democracy, even at its ugliest.