troll farm

A form of cyberfraud, where a large group of low-paid workers are hired to click on paid advertising links for the click fraudster, and set up []misinformation]] social media campaigns. 

Historical perspective: In an experiment in 2019, a Google subsidiary called Jigsaw paid a Russian troll farm $250 to carry out a disinformation campaign, said Wired. Jigsaw first created a website—seeded with blog posts and comments they’d written to make it appear more real—for a political initiative called Down With Stalin, referring to a hot-button debate in Russia about the legacy of the former dictator. Then, to test how easily the liberal campaign could be undermined, Jigsaw, posing as political adversaries of the site, paid a service called SEOTweet to discredit the “Down With Stalin” campaign. As reported in The Week, within two weeks, SEOTweet had posted 730 Russian-language tweets attacking the anti-Stalin site from 25 different Twitter accounts, as well as 100 posts to forums and blog comment sections.