cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/405394
A former Florida police officer who relocated to Moscow is one of the key figures behind it.
Dozens of bogus stories aimed at influencing US voters and sowing distrust ahead of November’s election. Some have been roundly ignored but others have been shared by influencers and members of the US Congress.
For example, one of these stories was published on a website called The Houston Post – one of dozens of sites with American-sounding names which are in reality run from Moscow - and alleged that the FBI illegally wiretapped Donald Trump’s Florida resort.
At any given time 17-40%, roughly, of any social media platform posters are automated bots. Plenty of legitimate uses, such as media manager applications, or automatic reposters, curation, etc.
And IIRC this also included the front-ends for Mechanical Turk style human gopers and 50-cent Army posters, etc. so maybe not so legitimate…