It probably only takes a staff on the order of a thousand people to make things go viral on the internet.

If it’s your job to just sign up for social media accounts (fill in the the captchas, type in a name, upload a few images) you could easily create at least a hundred per day.Multiply that by a thousand and that’s one hundred thousand accounts per day.

Of course you’d have to post some comments occasionally to make it look real. But that would just be re-wording the text from other comments. Of course if someone were to do this, youtube comments would look like, well… exactly like youtube comments are like right now.

So figure a a hundred thousand accounts per week with comments to make it look legit, that’s millions of accounts per year. Yeah you’d want to space it out a bit so it wouldn’t look suspicious. And you’d need to route the traffic through a botnet so the IPs are from the same country the account claims to be from. But within a year you’d have millions of accounts that all appear legit to any automated system checking them.

So now you’ve got the accounts and you want something to go viral. Have your thousand people start logging into accounts and running the video or whatever through your botnet, click like, leave a comment, maybe even check out the ad so the social media company makes a bit of money and aren’t incentivized to look at it too closely. This probably only takes around 10 seconds per account. You could have anything you want have at least a million likes and engagement within a day. Which is probably way more than is needed for the algorithms to start recommending the content to legitimate users. And then it’s all automatic from there.

Sure a few thousand people sounds like a lot. But not for the government of a country that wants to do disinformation.