For these last years headlines about all kinds of "bot armies" are constantly making the rounds, getting blamed for pretty much everything from Trump's election to Brexit.
Often based on some research that defines the parameters for a user being a "social bot", that they have extremely high false-positive rates, but still end up only identifying hundreds, maybe thousands of accounts, on platforms that have total user numbers in the hundreds of millions or even over a billion.
That is already enough to cause widespread paranoia about Chinese/Russian/Iranian trolls supposedly being everywhere.
So anybody on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit who's opinions and views don't align with a certain Overton window, are quickly labeled as being "foreign influencers", regardless of any arguments or facts whatsoever, in a purely ideological reaction of "What, you do not agree that <insert country> is evil?! How dare you!".
Meanwhile, barely anybody talks about the reality that these kinds of games are played by pretty much everybody [0] [1], but I guess it would be weird for a US American platform to ban users for spreading pro-US propaganda. Tho, it's still scary how completely oblivious most people seem to be about that, while seeing the Chinese/Russian/Iranian version everywhere.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...