I know of a few here in Germany, and I have no doubt that they would gleefully publish any US government networks they come across. And with the extreme polarisation in the US, there should be plenty of people or publications on either side to do the same.

The fact that, as far as I can tell, these tend not to be bots but manually-run fake accounts might point to an explanation of the relative lack of such activity: it might just be too expensive. And when it comes to networks targeting other countries, every country that isn't natively English- or Spanish-speaking is relatively save because you aren't going to find hundreds of Americans speaking Russian willing to work for low wages and reliably keep quiet about it.

That, of course, is in addition to the obvious reason that democratic countries by their very nature just don't do stuff like that. But I have a hunch the ever-cynical crowd here would take offence at the idea that some countries and governments sometimes don't behave in the worst possible way.

They absolutely do, with varying levels of transparency. I remember getting annoyed when the Scotland Office were posting anti-independence propaganda in the form of Buzzfeed listicles: https://www.buzzfeed.com/youdecide2014/scotland-the-uk-10-my...

Now, a couple of clicks will reveal that "you decide 2014" do say that they're the UK government, but it's not instantly obvious when you're looking at the Buzzfeed article.

The current UK Transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has previous for running a firm to game Google AdSense: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/sep/02/grant-shapp...

There have been several announcements of UK web propaganda operations: https://www.realwire.com/releases/British-Army-to-present-at... / https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/31/british-army...

Democracy isn't a black and white things. Turkey is a democracy, no matter how corrupt and authoritarian Erdogan is. And democracy-wise France is arguably closer to Turkey than to the UK anyway.

I am afraid I don't have a reference, but some years ago I read about a request for bids on persona management software on fbo.gov, so one person could run many accounts.

Being too cynical is certainly as wrong as being too naive. This sound a bit like that latter. I would think the Russian influence stories were a form of simple propaganda. That was not a mistake by intelligence because they already knew long before. They didn't plant bots though, that is too expensive for most countries, especially if the language barrier is that high. China might employ some people, but it is unfeasible for most countries.

To be honest, I think people accusing others to be bots are wrong in 99.9% of cases.

Yes, lots of people heard about bots and use the accusation incorrectly. But in many cases actual sockpuppets are easy to spot. There's lots of accounts used only for propaganda for example and switch from Chinese-supporting messages when there's something happening in China to Russia supporting content following some news, to Trump supporting the next month before elections. They don't even bother deleting old messages, because most people don't check / doesn't care.

I reported dozens of accounts spreading propaganda in 2014 and it was never actioned. This was everything from handbooks through to assassination clips.

It makes it worse when you consider that Twitter was their primary media and, had Twitter not followed the US line and actioned the genuine reports, then the impact ISIS had could have been reduced.

But that said - it’s not like Twitter is alone in their adherence to US gov foreign policy. All mainstream US media (WaPo, WSJ, NY Times, Economist et al) do the same thing. There is hardly any independence in international reporting.

But apparently there are some real accounts that follow this pattern. I have no idea why. Maybe Twitter suggests this username?

But yeah, stock photo/"generic"/drawing or no photo are more telling.