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Because "trolls" is a horrible term for it. It's propaganda and sow discord. Inflame the far-left and far-right, get people to distrust traditionally more obje

Because "trolls" is a horrible term for it. It's propaganda and sow discord. Inflame the far-left and far-right, get people to distrust traditionally more objective sources of information. Repeat lies on social media to reinforce desired narratives. Influence trending topics to direct discussion. All of this is fairly well known at this point. There are even cases of "troll" accounts being accounted and coming clean and sharing their twitter engagement numbers for particularly effective "fake news" tweets before deciding their exposed account. This isn't a few people in a basement it's a professionally run tech shop.

beaconstudios 8y ago
From what I've seen, the far-left have been inflamed since the late Obama years and the far-right have been inflamed by the actions and words of the far-left. All this goes back to Gamergate and further, and seems to just be spilling over more and more into the mainstream as the sides get more aggressive (though the severity does seem to have peaked in 2016/17 in my opinion). The Russian agents/bots I suspect I've seen are just adding fuel to the existing fire, though I question the effectiveness of their efforts. Overall the whole political division seems to predate the election and Russian involvement by quite a few years. It just seems to have been snowballing since. I mean, I remember seeing stuff about "feminazis" and "MRAs" like 10 years ago. I keep hearing that fake news and lies are being propagated but as a Brit I haven't really seen that outside the usual political propaganda around the referendum, and Trump's usual crass blathering that occasionally pops up in the news.