Why does nobody talk about the fact that Clinton and Democrats spent 10s of millions astroturfing various online communities? You could see r/politics go from fairly balanced to rabid pro-clinton when CTR got fresh funding infusions. You can check Alexa rankings and see the massive traffic surges at the same time. You could see sentiment shift on weekends when the shills were off.
Hell, the CIA had an entire "Meme warfare division" according the vault7 leaks.
It's hardly mentioned in many popular political forums, and when it is mentioned the user posting gets overran with claims of being a Russian agent, or that it's a conspiracy
> Why does nobody talk about the fact that Clinton and Democrats spent 10s of millions astroturfing various online communities?
Because that's a conspiracy theory, based on one pet interpretation of one press release and ignoring all the times Correct the Record denied it (such as the instance in this article you posted: "Barrier Breakers accounts are always identified as Correct the Record").
The article you posted describes what they actually did ("Much of the effort appears to be fairly anodyne so far. An official-looking Twitter account, Facebook page, and Instagram and Pinterest accounts have been set up. The social media accounts seem to consist mainly of graphics and videos that deliver inspirational pro-Clinton messages, content that appears to have been designed in the hopes that it might go viral.")
I have little doubt that the CTR conspiracy theory was largely spread by the very real Russian astroturfers. It was super effective at effortlessly shutting down Clinton supporters online.
> I have little doubt that the CTR conspiracy theory was largely spread by the very real Russian astroturfers.
Could you source/clarify this?
I agree that the narrative around CTR as an astroturf source is either massively overstated and outright wrong, but that's a basically negative claim - there's no real evidence for it. The Russian astroturf part is a very specific positive claim, and across the identified Russian accounts (e.g. Reddit, Tumblr) I haven't seen any indication that they meaningfully drove the CTR rumors.
It's not like Americans have any trouble starting political conspiracy theories without outside help; why are we laughing at claims of "this idea came from an astroturf campaign" and then making comparable claims without strong evidence?
Maybe no one's discussing it in this thread because this article is about something specific.