Is there an appreciable difference between paid channels for disinformation and non-paid? Just yesterday on this forum it was discussed how 19 of the 20 largest Christian pages were Russian troll farms [0]. You don't have to be paying Facebook to craft a public narrative. Admittedly, it does take some capital investment creating the content farm: a small army of modestly paid office workers abroad.
Sure, the article doesn't say who is funding them, and they aren't "based in" Russia. But looking at the big picture, is the war-torn semi-recognized developing eastern European country of Kosovo really investing its limited resources into funding large-scale efforts to destabilize Western culture and discourse? To what purpose? Isn't it much more plausible that there's a superpower involved somewhere? Isn't it extremely likely to be the superpower we know already does this?
Sometimes big true-true different from small true-true.
> Sometimes big true-true different from small true-true.
More often, people who lie to you about the small things are also lying to you about the big things.
One might even nurse a prejudice against accepting the word of sources who lie consistently, casually and without need, suspecting that "true" actually means something different to them. Taking the more charitable interpretation.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28691585