He didn't receive free press. His campaign hacked the ever living shit out of the progressive moral supremacism that drives modern narratives.
You call it free press now, but during the election, you most likely called it "Haha! Look at this stupid buffoon! Oh please yes, reveal how dumb he is, this will totally help Hilary!"
I think the correlation is that if the metadata-to-securiry response pipeline is incorrectly targeting people it is already biased against, then this is proof that the pipeline can also incorrectly target the people it is biased to ignore.
The author performed all of this during a three year period, I believe.
If ego was the only driving focus, wouldn't he have revealed himself earlier? Especially during the rise of alt-right micro-celebrities? How can you be a mere narcissist with a Hollywood background and completely avoid intentionally giving yourself the limelight?
The Butterfly War describes a theory of meta data warfare that forces a predator to change its behavior and target people it's been trained not to target.
In this case, the connection between Silicon Valley and national security apparatuses are so hypervigilant, everyone in the anaylsis pipeline accepted the meta data that arrested this guy to be sufficient.
The Butterfly War teaches you how to put anyone you want into that pipeline.