RT played the long game, and has done a surprisingly good job of gaining a following in fringe viewers throughout the US. Anecdotally, I participated pretty heavily in the first couple weeks of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Manhattan. For the first week or so, we got very little news coverage, and a lot of the established media was downplaying the movement, waiting for it to blow over, or picking the craziest people they could find out of the crowd to discredit us. Russia Today was one of the few news organizations who came out early, giving us positive coverage, and reflecting the views of the protesters more or less accurately. A lot of my friends became RT viewers because RT legitimately succeeded where the domestic media failed.

RT has played the strategy of going in and eating the domestic media's lunch when they hesitate to cover legitimate stories, and that has given them a dedicated following. Unfortunately, as time has passed, it has grown more clear (at least to me) that this bona-fide coverage is the bait they pull people in with, and that their coverage in general is of the journalistic quality of Fox News. They use the same tactics of lying through omission, stoking panic, appealing to emotion, and selecting stories to promote an agenda.

As for the social media shilling, the situation is extremely nuanced. At this point there are probably tens of thousands of organizations astroturfing social media to promote their interests. Russia gets a lot of attention, because they seem to be doing it on the largest scale in terms of influencing geopolitics, but I agree that they aren't the only ones doing it, and that if we make them stop, the problem won't go away. The media has spoken up a lot about Russia's twitter/facebook botting and shilling, but if we were to take a much closer look at the data, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see some shady domestic political think tanks and action committees doing it to the same extent. In fact, the shadowy domestic PACs engaging in astroturfing are probably ecstatic that Russia has taken the focus (and blame) off of them! The Internet has become a ideological battleground, and at this point, anybody who has any power to gain/lose has rolled up their sleeves and entered into the fray. I'm not quite sure what to do about it.