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If I were China here's what I would be doing:
Use bots to create Reddit accounts, subscribe to major subs, and then upvote comments based on woke and pessimistic sentiment analysis. This would be very easy to accomplish and could be done for at most 10 million dollars per year all in. With this small investment they could dominate all top level subreddits. It would be virtually undetectable by Reddit. Honestly, they don't even need bots.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=china+click+farm
You don't need to write comments, you just need to vote. When China brainwashed American POWs in Korea, they never told them what to say. They simply rewarded them for saying the right things. The Americans invented the Communist propaganda themselves. Training people on Reddit using updoots would be the simplest thing in the world.
I would be surprised if China wasn't already doing this on a large scale with Reddit, Tiktok, and other social networks.
That actually explains modern "journalism" frighteningly well. Use capitalist incentives against your opponents by signal boosting and paying the absolute worst journalists (see the top level post below) the most money to generate the most divisive shlock.
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