> So the Slate article is a summary - I didn't pretend it was a published peer reviewed journal article or anything else. I also upvoted your question so I'm not sure why both your question and my answer were downvoted.
>>> I'm not sure when you're referencing, but Russian troll farms used Sanders to divide the left on social media websites.
>> This is news to me, are you able to cite any specific evidence? (Not vague allegations or assertions of fact, but rather actual, specific, somewhat confirmable evidence.
> ~you reply with a link to a document which is exactly what I asked you to not reply with.
I expect this is why you were downvoted.
I am downvoted (on this comment, and several others within a span of a few minutes) for not accepting the popular meme. This topic seems to be very strongly identity-related, so logical thinking seems to become very downgraded, replaced by post-hoc rationalization and a variety of other fascinating cognitive quirks.
I mean, think about it - we are on HN, a website full of very intelligent people, and any comment asking for evidence on certain topics will be downvoted. Why doesn't one person ever provide some evidence and utterly crush the "idiot" conspiracy theorists? I believe the reason is, because people literally can't think properly in certain situations. Their heuristics completely overpower their conscious and logical mind, knowingly or not. Hopefully someone starts to notice this and actually studies it, because it seems like it could be very harmful to society.
I believe this is one of the root problems of the day, so I will continue to point it out and take my downvotes in lieu of reasoned disagreement, which never comes.
> If you are genuinely interested in this, then it is easy enough to search out what they're referencing in the article.
I've done so many, many times, and at the end of the trail (if the link aren't dead as some are in the linked article), inevitably the factual proof is always based on one or more articles that I earlier described as "claims with a healthy peppering of qualification or misleadingly speculative terms like "alleged", "according to", "supports the idea", "believed to be", Russian-"linked", etc."
I continue to ask those who assert factual knowledge on the matter, and continue to be disappointed.
> I'm not even sure you know what your burden of proof is here.
I do: none, because I've made no assertion, I've only asked for evidence of yours: "Russian troll farms used Sanders to divide the left on social media websites."
I am quite certain there is only suspicion of this. This is certainly the case with the "Russian" trolls on Twitter, because they said it outright, as well as described their identification methodology. I can't comment for sure on Facebook, because I've never encountered an article that describes the identification methodology.