How the geographical data of users is identified and measured is black-boxed by social media companies, so it can’t be independently verified. Users could also be routing their internet traffic through a Russian VPN, though they’re actually active elsewhere.

When I was young and the “internet” was becoming a thing, there’d be movies with hackers. In every movie where there was a hacker, the movie would make a very big production of how the hacker was routing their communication through a series of proxies to try to hide the where their position actually was.

This was back in the late 80’s or early 90’s.

So now there’s whole ass companies that will rent out server space/virtual machines by the hour for a handful of bucks and you pretty much get to do whatever you want with them.

Whole ass businesses exist that create and maintain large volumes of throwaway accounts for every social media platform ever.

Bot scripts exist to just take a database of user names, passwords, and generic instruction and just need to be pointed where they need to execute.

So like, nowadays, a single person with an axe to grind and a wallet full of beer money can just, mass report, mass upvote/downvote, comment spam, etc.