It does exist. It just doesn’t currently exist here, and Russian/Chinese/Iranian bots 1) hardly exist at all and 2) so far have had virtually no effect.

The reason people are seeing $evil_country bots everywhere is because our own government and our own corporate media tell us they are everywhere, not because they are everywhere. The propaganda is coming from inside the house. They’ve spent the last seven years and who knows how much money trying to convince us of. They’re trying to manufacture our consent to censorship.

They tell us what opinions are $evil_dictator talking points so we know what opinions to dismiss out of hand, and to see the people & organizations that express those opinions as malevolent foreign agents, so we never listen to them again. They’re training us to do some of the censoring for them.

The first step is to understand the media and propaganda.

I linked upthread about this specific propaganda campaign, but since people don’t click links, I’ll copypasta myself.

• IT Pro: Cambridge Analytica models were exaggerated and ineffective, [UK Information Commissioner’s Office] claims
• Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
• Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
• Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
• Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
• Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
• Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor’s Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
• Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
• Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away