They were instrumental in the whole "Uyghur genocide" thing where the only proof was Adrien Zenz suggesting there would be a possible future decline in population growth and called it a "cultural genocide".
The US State department has been running things like "Radio Free Asia" as state propaganda mills for decades. This has broken out into an industry of insiders getting board seats on various think tanks and churning out essentially policy desires as "studies". These studies are then used as citations for actual news articles to launder the policy desires into something that seems like a reliable source. Then people say "Look! this is really happening!" while 100s of articles are written citing the same untrustworthy sources, laundered through dozens of thinktanks funded by the DoD and state dept.
Neither of these sources support this claim as none of them include any discussion on Amber Heard('s legal team) using bots?
I think your bias is showing. From what I recall, both sides employed the exact same tactics, and we often saw blatantly inorganic discussions popping up in random subreddits on how $(SIDE_A) was the real villain and $(SIDE_B) only had supports because they were paid bots driven by their PR firm.
Things reached a point where I'm sure the same template was used by each counterpart.
On a bigger picture, I'm not sure why anyone still goes to places like reddit and believes anything showing up in the mainpage is still organic.
brand defence, nation-state influence operations.
There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.
The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.
Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.
So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.
Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up!
Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power".
[0] https://www.codastory.com/
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-fac...
There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence.
HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.
Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.)
But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading.
(Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)
There are many Ivorians and Senegalese promoting the CCP’s ‘Community of common destiny’ on Reddit, for example.
Edit: Community of common destiny for mankind/‘Community of Nations’
Talking about a country that sets up fake think tanks is a good way of triggering them.