I very much doubt they're competent enough to pull something like this convincingly here in the US and avoid early detection and counter-intelligence response. Thus far no evidence whatsoever was presented that any of this was Russian, let alone state sponsored. That's either some truly elite level GRU work, to the standard we have not ever seen before, or there is, in fact, no "paid Russian trolls" on The_Donald. My opinion: there's no way in hell they could pull this off without getting noticed _well before_ the anointed Democratic candidate lost the election.
Christ, even the Canadian government does this, and we're about as unsophisticated as it gets.
The naivete of people getting their panties in a bunch over the revelation that The Evil Russians participate in hacking and propaganda, how can you be so unaware of how the world works?
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.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/fillin...
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.