Russian and Chinese Bots Fueling Online ‘Violence’ After Charlie Kirk Shooting
(www.thedailybeast.com)
I DMed you an example of one of the accounts posting constantly about US politics, and then one day using non-US currency punctuation in their numbers. That in itself isn't all that weird, obviously, but then someone asked them the fairly obvious question of, wait, hang on, where are you from? If you're not from the US (which looking at your numbers you clearly are not), then why do you post constantly about US politics? And, of course, the particular take they had on politics was exactly the same bizarre "all anti-Democrats all the time" opinion set that a lot of these accounts tend to have.
Anyway, when asked about the punctuation, they professed total confusion about the question, made a weird comment about symbols on their calculator, accused people of being super weird for thinking anything was strange about the non-American style they used for money, got hostile, and refused to engage anymore. Basically their answer was 100% bizarre. That part of it is a pretty strong indication that they're a foreign influence operation, although of course I have no idea whether that means "Russian," and it's impossible to really be sure.
They've long since been banned for other sins, but that was the one that really stuck out to me as actual evidence. Most of the time, it's impossible to tell the difference between an influence operation and just someone with a particular set of genuine opinions. They're only really obvious when they fuck up like that or something, which doesn't happen all that often.
There you go, no squirming required.