Comment by ekianjo

Over the years I have personally found multiple accounts on Twitter/X that appeared to be Russian propaganda trolls (or someone with resources looking to appear that way).

They would pretend to be Americans and pushing certain narratives by retweeting/following/commenting/etc.

I found one that claimed to be a single mother living in the midwest USA. It was using a cropped photo from the personal blog of an Australian woman (who had multiple kids and a husband). If you went far enough back in the history you could find accidental Russian language usage. The timestamp trends in the posting behavior were clearly not American. It followed, and was followed by, other similar troll accounts.

Most recently I found one that claimed to be a 26 year old woman from the US. No reverse image search hits on the English web. But reverse image search with yandex you'd get hits for a couple of vk profile picture databases. From there it was possible to find the actual vk account, which was a Russian woman who clearly was not the same person.

I could link you some of the accounts but the ones I've reported have been banned or deleted by now. I'm sure the US government is wrong on some stuff but there's too much evidence for stuff like the Internet Research Agency to be fake [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40656550

This is a comment I made on hackernews, replying to someone who (IIRC) claimed to be German but (in my opinion) was clearly a Russian astroturfing account.

After I mentioned it they deleted their comments, and they have since all been flagged by the moderators here.

My goodness, there are so many examples of more or less direct Russian influence operations. Here's a recent one where a bunch of political influencers were being paid ~$100,000 per single podcast episode by a company in Tennessee, whose founders were fully aware that their super-generous investor was located in Moscow.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/media/right-wing-media-influe...

Maybe you missed the recent news...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-indicted-cov...