I think the situation with content is similar to protests. There are all sorts of people at a major protest. There's a good chunk of "organic protesters", who are there for the original cause. Then some are there because they like the feeling of something happening, the buzz of a crowd, the hype. You could call this the bandwagon effect for example. There will be people there, leader types, who see it as an opportunity to further a goal of theirs. There will be people who want to fuck things up, and feel that this will be a good opportunity for them to let go. And there might be people, who are planted there to start an actual riot - for example, in order to dismiss the original group as being overly violent and thus their goal reprehensible.
It's hard to guess what percentage of that whole crowd is "organic" to the original cause. But it can be seen that a good lot of them aren't.
This is evidence that state actors influence the internet, which I think is uncontroversial. However, the specific statement here was that these left-wing communities were the result of this influence, which I find highly doubtful and in itself perhaps an attempt to de-legitimize their cause.
Or, an incident where one country's patriotic page was run from an entirely different country: https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/10/01/usa-facebook-page-ukr...
I think the situation with content is similar to protests. There are all sorts of people at a major protest. There's a good chunk of "organic protesters", who are there for the original cause. Then some are there because they like the feeling of something happening, the buzz of a crowd, the hype. You could call this the bandwagon effect for example. There will be people there, leader types, who see it as an opportunity to further a goal of theirs. There will be people who want to fuck things up, and feel that this will be a good opportunity for them to let go. And there might be people, who are planted there to start an actual riot - for example, in order to dismiss the original group as being overly violent and thus their goal reprehensible.
It's hard to guess what percentage of that whole crowd is "organic" to the original cause. But it can be seen that a good lot of them aren't.