Real quick: I wouldn't call those gov't agencies nor are they gov't-funded. The RNC and DNC are not gov't entities, they are "private" "non-profit"s. It's fair to believe that a ton of astro-turfing and false media are bankrolled by these agencies, but I don't think it's healthy to walk about life day-to-day imagining your tax dollars are used to actively battle back trolls on imageboards.

Hm, not sure left leaning organizations would have any success on 4chan. There was an obvious alt right Astro turfing campaign for the past few years, though. 4chan used to be a solid seat of extreme liberalism, and it swapped seemingly overnight to hardcore conservativism. Same with /r/conspiracy

> 4chan used to be a solid seat of extreme liberalism

Uh, when was that?

Some members/participants/whatever you want to call it of Anonymous had goals that align better with U.S. definitions of 'liberal' than 'conservative', but that doesn't support your assertion.

was 4chan ever "liberal" in the sense that the term is used in American politics? that doesn't vibe with my impression of the community there. It's always had a lot of libertarian undercurrents but was really just disaffected and non-partisan until the Trump thing happened.

4chan used to be anti-mainstream. During the bush years it was fairly liberal, and with Obama it became extremely conservative. Trump was seemingly able to break this trend by embracing them and their practices ("meme magic").

Arguably supporting Trump is anti mainstream.

The Trump thing was a snowball effect. /pol/ was definitely a Trump supporting corner of the website to begin with, but since it was (especially before /r/the_donald blew up) pretty much the only place doing that for quite some time, it ended up attracting a lot more users to the website in general. Source: http://www.rank2traffic.com/4chan.org

TrendMicro also issued a 'technical' report that basically just said 'we think this was the same APT as in Crowdstrike's report' without any discernible discussion of how they came to that conclusion.

And Crowdstrike has since withdrawn several claims from their bogus "report", and rewrote parts of it.

I'm not sure you can actually know such efforts ever existed there.

We both know we're talking about /pol/ here, and one of /pol/'s things is that literally anyone disagreeing with the extreme hivemind there for any reason is considered a shill. It's to the point where an honest effort at shilling couldn't be differentiated from trolling, as they'd both be received the same way.

I'd be much more worried about paid posters on some place like Reddit - it's much more mainstream and has a much more credulous population.