Astroturf happens everywhere... news at 11... it's easy to laugh at the paid Russians and their broken English but it wasn't too long ago you had stories of British intelligence rigging online polls and the US government contracting out software to manage mass amounts of social media personas to target jihadists(and I'm sure the same tactics are being used against Russia too).
The question for me is how to counteract this kind of trolling. If someone is saying something stupid, it's easy as an individual to ignore it ignoring the time wasted reading it, but it's genuinely deadly for communities.
I think some kind of web of trust, except this time for comments or social media artifacts, is probably the way to go.
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