God i hate popular media - always trying to change the narrative with these misleading headlines.
Being a paid russian asset isn’t being duped. I hope those things rot in prison.
To be fair. I don’t think it’s impossible that some of these were so stupid to even realize that the ones paying them were Russian.
They absolutely knew. There’s a note about them googling “time in Moscow” when their contact wasn’t replying, to see when they’d wake up and come back to work.
I’m sure 99+% of them knew, but I’m not ruling out someone waking up to: “what? But the company that was paying me millions to convince people that Ukraine was the enemy was based in Illinois! There’s no way they they were Russian”. Every time I underestimate the stupidity of people they tend to surprise me, so I no longer do.
The idea that doing something with someone who turns out to be a foreign asset makes you a conspirator is a bit ridiculous. I don’t see anyone in this community accusing Kathy Hochul of being a Chinese asset since she’s a Democrat, but accusing her of that would be ridiculous too. She probably didn’t know that her aide was a Chinese agent.
They knew the people paying them worked from a Russian timezone, they actually put it in an email.
Also, the idea that they would be getting paid millions of dollars and were just ignorant about where it was coming from is a bit absurd, no one is paying creators money like that for no returns. They didn’t have any call to actions, no affiliate links, nothing. So there’s no way these large content creators didn’t know that that money was funny
