Troll farms are just one form of social media manipulation. A far more common thing is a mailing list or a discord or similar used for covert coordination of th

Troll farms are just one form of social media manipulation. A far more common thing is a mailing list or a discord or similar used for covert coordination of things which aren't supposed to be coordinated: voting on social media sites, reporting campaigns, news coverage spin (or news blackouts), even infiltration and false flag posting. It's been a problem for years. I think that online, Wikipedia was the starting point, since it was the first social site which was vulnerable to entryism and actually a tasty prize to have control over. There's no end to the "secret mailing list"-scandals of Wikipedia over the years. And Wikipiedia at least publicly acknowledges off-site secret coordination as a problem, unlike most other supposedly user-driven sites. The less actual support a view has, the more it may tend to troll farming or corporate astroturf. But for views with some degree of popular support, left and right, backroom deals in the vampire castle is where the serious manipulation business happens.