I remember the early days of social media. Once upon a time, Livejournal was THE social media site. A lot of fandom stuff took place on there.
Then it got sold to Russia, and there’d be days when LJ was weirdly down and unstable (this was before Cloudflare and DDoS protection) for some reason–and I’d learn there was some political strife going on on the Russian-speaking side, because their politicians and thinkers and radicals had made it their online home (long before any politicians in the USA used social media). But I was too young at the time to understand what was going on. All I knew what my fandom space where I talked about books and stuff was having outages due to stuff going on on the Russian-speaking side.
Basically, Russia was using the platform to perfect manipulating social media on its own citizens. Then it turned around and used it on the English-speaking and western world–and other nations have been watching very keenly, and seeing how effective it’s been. That China would do it too is basically like, “Duh, of course they would. It WORKS.”