I was also curious about this as when I first looked at the link it said 'state-backed' which immediately put the NSA and the likes in my mind. Then it went into Saudi propaganda. But if we look at even recent HN headlines with the likes of Facebook [1] we can see that political misinformation is a big problem in the US as well and I wonder why this article focuses on the Saudis and not state backed information operations as a general world wide problem. My guess is that people don't consider your average politician buying fake news ads to swing an election to be 'state-backed' where as if the president was caught they would.

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/468216-zuckerberg-doub...