[jabjq]

The best, most successful political ads in social networks are not paid.

[duxup]

Last time I signed up for a twitter account I was IMMEDIATELY followed by a handful of accounts. I'm not sure how. Two even seemed to try to pretend to be from my local town, albeit awkwardly. They had a lot of normal-ish posts.

Then after a bit their posts turned pretty dark / lots of allusions to "new people in town". I was curious so I checked out their profile, one described themself as "a former libtard who saw the light". Those profiles pretty much went down the path you'd expect after a while.

[soco]

I read about this kind of tactics. Same with Facebook groups - knitting, cooking, history: they start by gathering a mass of normal fans, then slowly turn to the original aim of spreading propaganda. And in this case it was all pro-russian anti-war good-old-communist-times garbage.

[andrepd]

Of course. Literally every time I search anything in my native language on incognito youtube or a fresh instagram, I immediately get suggested propaganda videos from the local far-right party. Who needs ads when you've got The Algorithm on your side?

[bigbadfeline]

The Algorithm is present here to, there are dedicated down-voting accounts, many of which are far-right and apparently well funded... They monitor for comments that don't fit their propaganda and down-vote them - no argument, no explanation, no interaction. It was done to your comment too, so I had to intervene.

[JKCalhoun]

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

[MITSardine]

Hopefully a future step is enforcing airwave time limits/parity as is done in traditional media, for the countries that have such rules.

How this can be done is another question, not just from a technical standpoint...