...as someone who is oblivious to these things (only knew it was a "thing" last night)...can someone explain why this is harmful and not just people wasting time?
Which violates the Twitter policy against intentionally misleading election content. Pretty straight forward.
I think the real reason they got banned is that under every tweet of every blue-checkmark liberal on Twitter you'd find dozens of replies of accounts called NPC209834029 with the same avatar nodding and saying the same platitudes. But of course, when all the replies to all Trump tweets are from blue-checkmarks shitting on him, Twitter doesn't seem to care. :P I think neither should be banned, but I guess they know better.
Although the NPC case is probably about some random people on twitter that like to make fun of some targets, the story about Russians seems to have more involved actors.
What got those 1500 banned were tweets like "Get out and vote November 7th!" 1 day after the actual date of Nov 6th and the boosting and retweeting among all the accounts.
I'm right wing and I find the boxed responses from leftest to line up with some of the NPC stuff I saw.
Many of the founders ran printing presses or newspapers to push their own propaganda. The most prominent being alexander hamilton and the NY Post.
What is bad for democracy is censorship ( aka one sided propaganda ).