This article doesn’t support your conclusions; it states that these pages were being ran out of Macedonia and Kosovo, primarily for profit.
> A 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found that at least one member of the Russian IRA, indicted for alleged interference in the 2016 US election, had also visited Macedonia around the emergence of its first troll farms, though it didn’t find concrete evidence of a connection. (Facebook said its investigations hadn’t turned up a connection between the IRA and Macedonian troll farms either.)
Further, the article supports the point I was making:
> For the most part, the people who run troll farms have financial rather than political motives; they post whatever receives the most engagement, with little regard to the actual content. But because misinformation, clickbait, and politically divisive content is more likely to receive high engagement (as Facebook’s own internal analyses acknowledge), troll farms gravitate to posting more of it over time, the report says.
This isn’t evidence of a concerted influence campaign. It’s not even clear what the article means when it refers to these outfits as troll farms. What I imagine when I hear the phrase is a professionalized state-backed outfit with a specific mandate to influence public opinion in a target country; this isn’t what is being described in the article.
There’s evidence that Russia engaged in these kinds of influence campaigns during the 2016 election, but I’ve never seen evidence that they were particularly effective at it.