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It's equally possible you're just assuming everyone who doesn't share your opinion is a paid troll. I got called a Russian troll multiple times for saying Biden had no business being in this election and that we could do better. Imo it's far more likely you're talking to a child than a "paid troll" if their opinions don't make sense and they dig their heels in. Assuming everything is some grand conspiracy instead of accepting that some people have different beliefs and opinions, or might just be that stupid, simply isn't healthy. Trolls and such exist, sure, but I don't think they are anywhere near as common as you're implying.
No, there's more to it. All the troll farms that get busted are disinformation machines, and most of them are sponsored by Russia.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ukraine-takes-down-massive-bot-farm-seizes-150-000-sim-cards/
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/07/09/feds-disrupt-bot-farm-that-spread-social-media-lies-for-putin/74343215007/
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/14/europe/russia-yevgeny-prigozhin-internet-research-agency-intl/index.html
There's also Cambridge Analytica. And there was the Mueller report.
It isn't a feeling, it's facts. And I have said it way before there was evidence. OP is right, it's easy to detect them. I use the tag feature to keep track. A lot of my tags vanished a couple weeks ago, so I assume there was a sweep or bills haven't been paid.. Some I had to readjust because my first impression was wrong, and they were indeed organic users that argued like bots.
I had been hunting bots on reddit for years, you get a sense for it, and also where they're from and what their intentions are.
They're plentiful but currently at a low, at least on Lemmy and Youtube.
Edit: For a while there appears to be also bots from everything left of Putin and Trump now, but they seem to be informative and fighting against the disinformation of the farms that have wrecked havock since 2015.
Edit 2: I agree with you though, there's a lot of real people that believe and repeat the lies they've learned from the bots
Sure, but it's also quite obvious when you stumble upon a real one. And I mean for example thinking 100.000 recent deaths is okay because NATO scary (for example) just boils down to either deluded or paid. IMO.