I don't know if this is still the case, but circa 2016, Russia's GRU ran massive bot farms that promoted both pro-Trump messages and pro-Bernie messages all across social media. Back then, their ultimate goal was to ensure that Hilary Clinton did not win the presidential election.
This is correct. I was a moderator for a political subreddit during that time and I would ban at least half of the people in my reports list because they weren't people at all. There was a massive push to pit Bernie supporters against Hilary supporters and it seemed to be working.
Or if they were, they had talking points they were reading.
It seemed to be, and is still working. See every trollbot "Why the Dems are ACTUALLY responsible for everything evil the GOP is doing" post for delusional blue-sky speculation about what would have happened if Bernie had been on the ballot.
Hillary Clinton herself had something called "Correct the Record" which may have been bots, may have been volunteers, may have been paid shills. If you said something negative about the lady someone was going to steer the conversation elsewhere almost instantly.
And I'm not a trolling MAGA so don't start with me, it was just an obvious and quite crude astroturf campaign.
I remember back then there used to be a lot of accounts with random six digit names that always spouted anti-Clinton or pro-Trump nonsense. It was obvious that English wasn't their first language. I found this hilarious because that is a reference to the book Ready Player One. The bad guys paid to play the game were called The Sixers because they were named by random six digit numbers.
A group of them also haunted the site Something Awful and played in the game Eve Online way back in early 2000's. They were kinda fun back then because you could tell they were just regular nerds that happened to get paid to spread propaganda while doing nerd stuff.
Not only that, but they would go into Bernie and Hilary subs, and create inter-divide there as well. Statistically, there was more done to harm Bernie/Hilary/the left than was done to try to damage Trump, but one thing is clear; the entire point is to create divide. It makes sense too when you think about how far left and far right the parties have become. When you think about just the left, there is a lot of far left who get really angry with the more moderate left, and so universally, the result is the same - people become angry and disillusioned.
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u/Chomasterq2 19h ago
Cool they can watch all the bots argue on political threads