I'm not sure about why anyone would confess, but I'm fairly certain MS used to pull this sort of stuff, and not in that sophisticated a fashion - back in the days of Windows Phone 7 and then 8, there were people all over slashdot talking about how
amazing the platform was and how the developer experience was just the best... before developer builds were available.
Maybe I was misreading it, but to me at the time it seemed like a flood of unreasonably positive people gushing about something they couldn't really have had any experience with.