[hackinthebochs]

This is one of the most absurd talking points of this whole thing. It doesn't take "superpowers" to zero in on existing rifts in a society and magnify them. It has been well documented that Putin has a well-oiled disinformation machine that is adept at exploiting existing social issues.

[mike_hearn]

Please read my article. The sources you believe are "well documenting" these things are junk - see the paper that generated stories about 100,000+ Russian bots and how its analysis simply doesn't support their conclusions at all. Their definition of "bot" was equivalent to any human who happened to use Twitter slightly more than average, so not surprisingly they identified huge numbers of "bots".

I've looked into these stories about Russia repeatedly. They never survive basic fact checking, and I'm not a journalist with special sources or access.

[emodendroket]

Who doesn't? The US has those too and they don't just operate internationally.

But more to the point, there is a moral panic going on where the bar is drastically lowered for what information is considered credible of it involves "Russian collision," and it seems to mostly serve domestic political purposes. How else can you explain a raving crank like Louise Mensch appearing in mainstream news sources?