Notable were two kinds of messages: those that promoted images of Mexican violence and chaos—images that might make people feel they need a strongman to restore order—and those that angrily opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement and the United States more broadly. Venezuela-based and pro-Russian trolls—one analyst called them an “entire army of zombie accounts”—were also active together in Spain, most notably at the time of the illegal 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia. Organized by Catalonia’s separatist regional government without a legal basis in Spanish law, the referendum
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