People don't have to believe the misinformation they repeat, as long as they believe it justifies some action that will benefit them. For example, the more depleted the Colorado river basin gets, the more British Columbia will turn out to be full of terrorists and cartels, or its leaders plotting to disrupt the Frasier River, or whatever else... It's not like the details matter.

What matters is that the people in the place with the thing you want are evil now.

I don't rule out hostilities directed at Canadians on lemmy being something directly fomented by bots or including bot participation. But that's a rather low-value influence operation. I'd wager at least some is just a side effect of the vector that concerns me more: the faithful spreading a gospel aimed at Americans to manufacture American consent for something.