Yeah, I looked at this comment section when the article was first posted, and then looked at it now–and boy is it a mess.
One part astroturfing, one part “useful fools” who actually do genuinely believe what they’re saying. Then all the rest of the other people wandering around, adding to the chaos.
Insofar as “warfare” goes, dropping some English-writing locals into a chair with a cheap chromebook or laptop is basically a ROUNDING ERROR when it comes to defense and military budgets.
For how effective it is, it’s so fucking cheap. And beancounters and accountants LOVE cheap. Dude over there wants expensive weapons requiring expensive manufacturing facilities to be made, and THIS guy here wants an office space with an internet connection in bumfuck nowhere? Let’s fund the bumfuck nowhere propaganda guy.
And the US, the UK, Canada even, many western European countries have shown their populations are vulnerable and weak to online misinformation. So from a real-world monetary angle, it’s SUCH a great bang for your buck.
If I were running a country that couldn’t compete from a weapons standpoint–due to any variety of reasons…poor country, or a culture of corruption, or lack of scientific manpower or knowledge because of brain drain or something…whatever–and all I had to do was pay some poor folk who desperately needed income to feed themselves and their families, and they’d sit in front of cheap chromebooks or laptops or whatever and monitor certain sites for keywords or certain discussions, and it’d have AS MUCH EFFECT on western countries as we’ve seen it’s been having over the past 10 years…yeah. It’s a no-brainer. I’d do it.
Like, a country that already feeds its own citizens propaganda from cradle to grave isn’t going to flicker an eyelash of doing the same thing to its enemies. ESPECIALLY not when it’s so fucking cheap. And given American and western culture is so prevalent that people actually say “America has no culture”, other nations might even see messing around on social media as nothing more than fighting back, so it’s not just some military spy-thing driving it, but a sense of pride, of David taking down a Goliath with nothing more than a few stones made of words on the internet.
Yeah, it’s happening. It makes too much financial sense not to. It’s cheap AND effective. Any aggressive power is going to make use of that tool, esp. if they’ve having trouble obtaining other tools.