comment: >
  
  How do you discern an astroturfer from someone who just has the opposite opinion? Just curious.
context: Holy shit the comments in this thread are all so weird. I feel like I'm reading multiple AI chatbots arguing with each other >
  
  Its actually remarkable how much the quality of comments change when the same story is posted to r/news vs r/worldnews depending on the topic being posted. You'll really notice the trolls in action. >
  
  Which is suppose to be higher quality? >
  
  World News is much larger, and therefore is targeted by bot farms more for misinformation campaigns.
  News is smaller, but there was a large push by the alt right during the Trump era to try and take it over. There are still remnants of that in the comment section with people with ultra right-wing views cropping up more often then usually expected.
  So the World News bots often seem more credible. >
  
  Yeah, /r/news is still significantly astroturfed by the far-right, just watch what happens when crime stories with a black suspect is posted. Often the top 2-3 posts (with thousands of upvotes) are blatantly racist. Though I guess it was worse under Trump.
  On /r/worldnews we mostly have pro-Russian / pro-Erdogan / pro-CCP astroturfers. A few years back Iran had surprising influence as well. They don't have the numbers to significantly influence votes of the top posts, but scroll a bit down and you'll often see them having great impact. This is especially true for issues fewer people care about, where they don't get much pushback from real users and can easily form the narrative, just look at pretty much any post that deals with China as an example.