It's an ephemeral photo-based private messaging platform popular amongst teenagers. I have zero doubt that it's carrying a ton of underage illicit content, but most of it is probably being made and consumed by teenagers themselves. Still a legal nightmare for Snapchat.
No, quite the opposite. The contention that 'psyops' were being conducted using bots is now in serious doubt because of this new research.
And far from such 'psyops' being the act of the American federal government, as you suggest, instead it was argued that the Russian government was responsible.
And the accusation that there was collusion with Russians to achieve this was the central driving force behind the impeachment and near-removal of the U.S. president.
It's completely irrelevant and nonsensical to respond to this research by claiming it proves "the feds" are "doing psyops" domestically.
So first the evil Russian government (with a gdp smaller than several US states) was behind the bots that were reported by white papers funded domestically. Now that the bots are seen as fake, it was the evil Russians again that faked the domestically funded reports! It's amazing how competent their government is at espionage and how grossly incompetent ours is on every level, according to you.
I thought the accusations of collusion were more about one-sided release of information from hacked servers? and that the bots accusation (which is not disproved here afaict?) was more directed at the russians _in addition_ to the hacking accusations. but i always understood that the collusion was strictly about the hacking. correct me if i'm wrong.
