I'm no expert, but I'll take a shot at some answers... > 1) What is a "troll farm" and what is the criteria used for a distinction between a troll farm and mer

I'm no expert, but I'll take a shot at some answers... > 1) What is a "troll farm" and what is the criteria used for a distinction between a troll farm and merely some points of view one might disagree with? Maybe this is mentioned somewhere, but I don't see it clearly defined in the link. It's down to intent. I'd define it as: "A troll farm is intended to manipulate opinion in some manner for political goals by (mis)representing itself as a genuine member of the community it intends to manipulate." > 2) What is the proof that these are indeed foreigners? It would be trivial for a social media company to label domestic users they find distasteful as foreigners to more easily silence certain points of view, especially given the media's unwillingness/inability to understand nuanced technology issues. I don't think TFA provides any proof of its claims, but points to a MIT Technology Review article [0] that claims a report "obtained by MIT Technology Review from a former Facebook employee not involved in researching it" as its source. It would be entirely reasonable to dismiss the entire article as "fake news" based on this attribution. > 3) Heck, where is the proof that these pages are even moderately operated by actual people and are not mostly bot-generated content? Again, no proof provided. Does that make a difference to the intent of the page, though? > 4) We live in a global, connected world that embraces diverse points of view, right? Are eastern Europeans or others, many of whom still embrace a traditional Christian heritage, expected to not post about their point of view because somebody in San Francisco claims its a troll? That's not what these pages do (post content in Eastern European languages intended for Eastern European audiences addressing issues faced by Eastern European christians). They're posting in English about things that are contentious for American readers. > 5) How can a data scientist make a definitive claim that the people running these sites have "never been to church"? Maybe these social media firms are making big assumptions about people and are entirely wrong. Maybe they have entirely far too much information about people. I didn't read that as a definitive claim, but more as an opinion expressed by one person. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210917012652/https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210917012652/https://www.techn...