For the strange opinions you just don't find -- e.g. conspiracy theories about all the West media being after Russia, which are only written in Putin's controlled media.
Then there were claims about Ukrainian right wing extremists (which got really few votes in the last election) and other strange things you only see in Putin's media.
Arguments were often just not relevant for Sweden. Like "but what about USA in Iraq" -- that only works in USA (and maybe Britain), if that. Even the Swedes that condemn the Iraq invasion, not so few, of course have no problems ALSO condemning that Russia starts to treat Europe like Hitler in the 1930s; military threats, destabilisation, annexations etc.
The Russians avoids all questions about where they were writing from and none claimed to not be Russian. If it was proved where they came from (e.g. logs from the proxies they use, or something), it would automatically be news in Sweden.
Then we have the obvious bad Swedish, the first month a lot seemed to be from Google Translate. The bad voting scraping (one comment posted a bit down in a comment tree -- 10-15 top votes in seconds; never happened otherwise).
Edit: And about a state's trolling/astroturfing being high quality: First, note the low quality of conspiracy theories from Putin's junta. The personal envoy of Putin, Sergej Markov, yesterday claimed that Sweden, Poland, Finland and the Baltics had Russophobia -- and threatened with a new World War if the countries joined NATO!! And other crazy stuff. That was worse than before 1991 -- and note that it wasn't for internal consumption by Russians only reading Putin's media! Also, see that about starting with Google Translate. There are lots of quite small languages in Western Europe. How do you to a reasonable cost quickly find enough people that know Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, etc, etc? Then you have to train them (or give them stuff to translate and post).
Edit 2: I hope the above is readable. Ask otherwise, I might have the energy to continue.
Edit 3: The main difference compared to spam is that spam has much less resources, it is much less work intensive. There are maybe one message per 100K receivers. With astroturfing in the end, most (probably not all) comments will be at least partly written individually. If the same comment is posted in many places, e.g. something like Disqus can detect them directly (or Google, for that matter).
>conspiracy theories about all the West media being after Russia, which are only written in Putin's controlled media.
I've written those in English (I'm USian), and I'm not in any way Russian. The slant of the coverage of the last Olympics in the US was negative to an absurd degree, and I've simply never seen that before.
For the strange opinions you just don't find -- e.g. conspiracy theories about all the West media being after Russia, which are only written in Putin's controlled media.
Then there were claims about Ukrainian right wing extremists (which got really few votes in the last election) and other strange things you only see in Putin's media.
Arguments were often just not relevant for Sweden. Like "but what about USA in Iraq" -- that only works in USA (and maybe Britain), if that. Even the Swedes that condemn the Iraq invasion, not so few, of course have no problems ALSO condemning that Russia starts to treat Europe like Hitler in the 1930s; military threats, destabilisation, annexations etc.
The Russians avoids all questions about where they were writing from and none claimed to not be Russian. If it was proved where they came from (e.g. logs from the proxies they use, or something), it would automatically be news in Sweden.
Then we have the obvious bad Swedish, the first month a lot seemed to be from Google Translate. The bad voting scraping (one comment posted a bit down in a comment tree -- 10-15 top votes in seconds; never happened otherwise).
I also posted a couple of links here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214
And so on...
Edit: And about a state's trolling/astroturfing being high quality: First, note the low quality of conspiracy theories from Putin's junta. The personal envoy of Putin, Sergej Markov, yesterday claimed that Sweden, Poland, Finland and the Baltics had Russophobia -- and threatened with a new World War if the countries joined NATO!! And other crazy stuff. That was worse than before 1991 -- and note that it wasn't for internal consumption by Russians only reading Putin's media! Also, see that about starting with Google Translate. There are lots of quite small languages in Western Europe. How do you to a reasonable cost quickly find enough people that know Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, etc, etc? Then you have to train them (or give them stuff to translate and post).
Edit 2: I hope the above is readable. Ask otherwise, I might have the energy to continue.
Edit 3: The main difference compared to spam is that spam has much less resources, it is much less work intensive. There are maybe one message per 100K receivers. With astroturfing in the end, most (probably not all) comments will be at least partly written individually. If the same comment is posted in many places, e.g. something like Disqus can detect them directly (or Google, for that matter).