Well, one thing that should be pointed out is that monetization by itself has really skewed political discussions on social media. To give one example, I was on a (edit: I should clarify it was a political page) Facebook page which was quite popular and had very good reach. At that point in time, the reach and interaction was pretty much legitimate and just helped along by Facebook algorithms. Even then though, the formula was pretty basic and we knew what it took to get a huge reach. Basically the more likes and responses you got, the more people would see it, and the more likes and responses you would get. I had posts that were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people and reluctantly fed into what it took to get a larger reach (like using images instead of just typing something). I have no doubt that there were many people goosing their numbers though, there were sites even then where you could do things like trade likes, and if you just had access to other pages you reach a massive audience by sharing posts on that page as well.
The thing is, Facebook changed things dramatically and cut off that easily manipulated method in favor of another (now you access a much smaller audience typically). Paid reach, which is more easily manipulated in truth. Facebook knows just about everything about their users, and if you're willing to pay up they will take any post and have it show up to in someone's feed that is more likely to react how you want them to react! You don't need bots, you just need money and Facebook will rig it for you. In that way though it's no different than paid advertisements I suppose, but think about it, what's the difference really? It's no more legitimate to buy reach than to employ an army of bots to achieve the same ends is it? Both are manipulations.
This all gets back to the fact that there never really has been an equitable and trustworthy way to get news or even share opinions. Newspapers have bias, the media in general has bias, and social media just amplifies how easily manipulated things are. Make no mistake though, there's nothing new about this manipulation. Badder Adder for Myspace, fake views for YouTube, fake plays on steaming sites, people complain about fake Twitter followers for Trump, but Hillary and Obama had a similar ratio. The truth is if it can be manipulated it will be manipulated, so just take it all with a grain of salt.
