[doktrin]

> claims along the lines like "Russia uses online trolling" seem exaggerated.

What?

gamergate, /pol, /b, alt-right, the_donald, antifa use online trolling. In context, saying a state actor uses online trolling is an extremely conservative claim. I'm sure there's online trolling in favor of and sponsored by US, Chinese and Macedonian interests (to name a few) too - but Russia's actions are much better documented.

[rev]

Alacritous state actors more nimble at trolling than 4chan? You decide, I don't care. My problem is that US, Chinese, Russian and Macedonian sponsorships by state actors are equally unproved - if you read into "Trolls from Olgino" reports carefully. US's sponsorship is objectively less probable: English being lingua franca hampers American wannabe "hybrid trolls" [0].

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/fillin...

[doktrin]

> My problem is that US, Chinese, Russian and Macedonian sponsorships by state actors are equally unproved

Disagree. There's no such thing as perfect certainty, but the only real question about Russian troll sponsorship is one of scale.

https://globalvoices.org/2015/04/02/analyzing-kremlin-twitte...

> US's sponsorship is objectively less probable: English being lingua franca hampers American wannabe "hybrid trolls"

This is an interesting observation, but I think you either underestimate American resources, or overestimate the logistics of online influence manipulation campaigns.

For illustration : there are about 1m fluent Russian speakers in the US, and about 4m fluent English speakers in Russia. Sure, it's a bigger talent pool : but both countries could rope in bilingual cyber propagandists by the thousands if they felt so inclined.