It’s been estimated that around 50% of the comments on the internet are bots. It’s cheap and easy to target people with messaging that influences their behavior. It’s worthwhile to try to prevent this.
And to further fuzz the culprits, the usa/china/russia people invest in each other's "countries".
If people feel represented and informed and wisely governed and have a stake in the system, adversarial information wars will be much less effective.
Trust in western governments is not great at the moment. The primary cause of this is probably not adversarial disinformation.
Also the Establishment: We also have to stop disinformation!
That's just the sort of false misinformation being propagated through the internet and social media these days that makes it difficult for us as a society to properly assess and deal with our problems.
There is no way that only 50% of comments on the internet are sock puppets of one kind or another.
Strap a neural net to an headless blink/webkit with a virtual mouse and keyboard.
Click farms would be used to generate the data for machine learning.
No way? Why not? First the content doesn't have to be original, just a variation of some provided template, then it doesn't have to be unique. Now combine this with automated tools and voila - even a single person can produce a lot of content but now multiple it with multiple accounts re-sharing it and you can increase it by order of magnitude.