I was torn on this one. I do agree with you, in that, if we can't trust them on stuff that was obvious in June of 2017, how can we trust the "facts" we can't check? However, this is at least an interesting hypothesis. The particulars are probably wrong, but all sorts of different parties might try "campaigns" like this for all sorts of different reasons. (Although GOP might not be my first suspect for dastardly clever schemes...)
The most likely possibility seems that we have algorithms fooling algorithms with no humans in the loop. Sure, there might not be enough "real" (i.e. a real human purchasing a real product) revenue sloshing around here to make the whole effort worthwhile. However, there might be a poorly configured dashboard somewhere that makes it appear as if that's the case... Meanwhile FB laughs all the way to the bank.
I find this propaganda in the weirdest of places. I was reading a physical book about artificial intelligence written by a CEO in the industry and it had multiple references to Russiagate (and stated as fact, of course). It had nothing to do with the subject matter and was mentioned off-hand, same as it is here.
