alt Hacker NewsAs one of several people, yes. In-kind contributions to causes and now (with Citizens United) candidates are not limited. You don’t have to be a nation state to hire human influencers, bot farms, coders to create new bot farms, or to influence search results and LLM outputs. You just have to have the cash or control to do it.
Years before he was President, in 1989, Trump himself took out four full-page newspaper ads in all four major NYC newspapers of the time calling for the deaths of the Central Park Five and broader use of the death penalty in general. The railroaded teenagers were later exonerated, thankfully without first being killed by the government. That’s just a small example of the kind of influence money can have on public discourse, well before everyone had a smartphone in their pocket.
Very good example, thanks for sharing. Too early do people jump to conclusions online, calling out other commenters as state bots and so on. Influence, and people, look differently than they imagine. Manipulators come in multiple shapes and sizes, and also, commenters often voice their own opinion, without any direct association with any other entity.