I think it's more than a little unlikely the US government was so obsessed with making the case for war it launched (and successfully concealed from the public) a massive campaign to troll online forums without even being able to do basic stuff like make the official case for war a bit more competently and "discover" some WMDs to vindicate themselves afterwards.
It's not like there's any reason to believe that the millions of US citizens who passionately believed in the necessity of bringing down the "Axis of Evil" or just enjoy trolling liberals would recuse themselves from online debate in the build up to the war
Paying enough people to troll enough web forums for there to be a non-trivial possibility the OP was interacting with several of them without being rumbled doesn't really seem orders of magnitude more difficult than paying a couple of "weapons experts" to lie for you, or getting some material your military possesses into a territory your military controls.
They tried that mate. But it turns out it's hard to find credible weapons experts that are total hacks with no qualms about lying. When it became clear that their chosen expert was going to expose the fact that there were indeed NO WMD's, he promptly died shortly before his report was due to be published:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)
By comparison, posting on online forums can be done very easily by anyone of any character.
Probably happened on a number of sides, as well as group organising on a voluntary basis to do propaganda, and individuals who were just that motivated, and so on.
My main point being though, black hat or white, pro Trump or pro Hillary, they were all spitting in the wind.
Your point is off the mark, propaganda works, it cost Hillary the election; that last minute FBI story swayed people and secured Trump as the winner despite the story being false.
It made the numbers move, but those are the same numbers that predicted a Hillary win. Clearly those numbers reflected more factors than absolute voting intention. For example: how acceptable it was to oppose Hillary in public.
Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.
Whether Comey influenced it or not is also a moot point, since Comey was a high-profile public servant making an official statement to the mainstream media, not a bunch of anyonymous forumites and Tweeters arguing with other anonymous forumites and tweeters across random internet backwaters.
The numbers didn't have time to move, that was the point of the late release, and why the polls were off, they didn't have time to adjust to the new information.
> Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.
I'm not pretending anything, you pretending that news didn't change the outcome of a close election is you being delusional.
Polls take time to move, some moved, some weren't re-polled before the election, and no polls aren't just polls; poll are a statistical sampling of the electorate and do allow you to draw a trend line and notice things like hey, that piece of news made a different in the outcome. That elections happen only once is not relevant, it doesn't invalidate the poll data that shows minds were changed.
It's not like there's any reason to believe that the millions of US citizens who passionately believed in the necessity of bringing down the "Axis of Evil" or just enjoy trolling liberals would recuse themselves from online debate in the build up to the war