I'm not the OP but I just wanted to say that it's not paranoia, as I've known of media agencies in my country (EU and NATO member) which had been hired to post favorable online comments on specific political candidates. That was happening about 5 or 6 years ago. I'm pretty sure that phenomenon has only gained momentum in the meantime.
Citation needed. I also used to have a photo of a Financial Times article back from 2011 (I think) of a NATO higher-up acknowledging the fact that Israel and Russia were already ahead of the game at that point in terms of online influencing, with the NATO official explicitly saying that both Israel and Russia have dedicated units for this.
From personal experience I can testify that Israel was actually the first in the game, as I remember engaging against very persuasive pro-Israel posters on reddit during the summer of 2006 (meaning during Israel's war against Hezbollah), at a time when that site was almost totally politics-free. That was a lesson for me and I've since given up on any Israel-related discussions online.
The Russian shill accounts started showing up two summers later, in 2008, during Russia's war with Georgia. Somewhere in the reddit server logs there's all this information stored and ready to be analyzed but I suspect no-one has any real incentive in doing this.
