there are almost certainly people propagandizing on chans, especially 4chans /pol/ as it has a fairly large user base and has proven to be very influential with dozens (or more) of academic papers written about its culture and dynamics.

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/11075/11269/83226 this paper shows trends in pol posting surrounding major news events (mass shootings). Specifically after the Pittsburgh shooting they see a significant change of a small number of pro trump links circulated hundreds of times immediately in the aftermath, more so than before the incident. There are similar papers and many more describing the culture to help potential actors assimilate as quickly as possible

Again, the causal nature is impossible to prove (unless Hiroyuki starts leaking ips and they can be linked to someone somehow, I guess), but it appears someone(s) has been using that forum to make a concentrated effort to promote certain ideas, mainly pro trump propaganda and antisemitism.

Based on estimates 4chan gets anywhere from 20-60 million visitors per month. /pol/ alone sees well over 100-120k posts per day right now per 4stats.io, 4chans official stats. It’s by far one of the most active boards, running about the same as /vg/, dedicated to general gaming, and also full of bullshit but the whiny gamer kind (which is a well established pipeline to places like /pol/). whereas core 4chan boards like /b/ (random, the original board, where kind of anything goes), and /a/ (anime, probably the earliest board once it split from just /b/ for everything) being the next most active see barely half this, 40-50k posts per day.

Basically /pol/ sees a massive amount of discussion from a giant group of angry impressionable (often young but not always) people who are absolutely willing to campaign, make and spread memes, flood comment sections, etc. you’re foolish if you think that’s not being astroturfed and botted by people with vested interests. like is the trump campaign directly doing it? Probably not, but is one of their pacs kicking some money to some stormfront dudes who are? Maybe. It could also potentially be some weird trump group that spams and is otherwise unaffiliated with the campaign of course. That’s still propaganda, it’s just not sanctioned “officially”.

And this was touched on but the /pol/ influence is seen throughout the boards as well. They’ll spout their talking points on the videogame boards as mentioned like /v/, /vg/, etc to pull in gullible people but also the anime board (/a/), even slow boards like do it yourself (/diy/) which sees like 400 posts a day will get posts about immigration impacting trade jobs as a way to shoehorn in the typical rhetoric

In comparison according to fedidb lemmy has a bit under 400k users (a bit over 1/10th active, around 45k) and a bit over 8 million posts. That’s a footnote compared to 4chan which itself is dwarfed by the giants like reddit, facebook, etc that see monthly visitor counts in the billions. Of the fediverse mastodon would make the most sense to astroturf as it has significantly more users and posts. Unless they see serious growth potential and want to establish trust early on the platform, which would make sense I suppose, but looking at lemmys growth charted out that could be a very long wait for a return on investment. While posting is free paying people/bots to post isn’t. But perhaps they’re hoping it will become like /pol/, a niche forum on the internet that has decent enough traffic to become surprisingly influential. I do think this is unlikely, but who the fuck am I?

Of course, the statistics are not fully accurate here for either. 4chans traffic is estimated and sources vary pretty wildly, 4chans post counts should be accurate as that does come from 4chan. fedidb info is accurate but iirc doesn’t necessarily include all instances. That said it’s unlikely there’s an a few instances that would wildly skew the data and most estimates for 4chans traffic are on the higher end of 40-50 million visitors per month