I'm hesitant to believe this one (but shared for discussion).
I constantly return to the idea that Russia's influence campaign being waged in "American" cyberspace is on a much larger scale than anyone yet understands. On the whole, people are still incredibly decent to one another out in meatspace, but a handful of radicals on either side, given disproportionate attention by the media (in their desperation to receive 10 trillion views per millisecond), also help to distort our perceptions. Of course, there's the fact that we should try to correct for how scummy people behave when given anonymity, but what'm I gonna do to even begin numerically evaluating and correcting for that one? What a crock. At least the Russians are leaving fingerprints in the data. And we will get an idea of the exact scale of that, but the research-illiterate U.S. can't seem to understand that scientific work (or building a legal case) takes time. Welp, back to getting recreationally offended, America's new favorite pasttime.
"Yet for some reason people assume that all the heinous shit on Reddit and 4chan are organic." it dates beck farther than we know that Russia cared. if anything, the inorganic effects went as such: Stormfront corrupted 4chan, then 4chan corrupted Reddit