Going from what currently seems to be popular: huge botnets that carefully try to curate "real" users from random accounts. Rolling your own (Network that is, like FB or TikTok) seems pretty unlikely regarding initial investments, user base etc.

I wonder what's stopping them. Initial investments is likely an issue for small, poor countries, but it can't be an issue for a country like India or Saudi Arabia, and the user base can be "convinced" to use the domestic thing by doing what India does: block foreign services.

It seems more sustainable and much easier to work with if you have your own network, and you don't rely on US-services looking away / Twitter tolerating your stuff.

Will never happen because Indian governments are stuck in an unceasing bureaucratic quagmire. A tech solution, especially one that has to be culturally relevant and edgy to appeal to young people is absolutely beyond the scope of the Indian government machinery.

Yeah also note that Russia has its own domestic replacements of the popular American services. They only had to resort to bots etc for influencing American elections.

I totally agree with you there, I was arguing from the view of a bad actor, not necessarily a government.

For a bad actor, the cost-reward looks pretty low (if we assume a high initial investment like a couple hundred million dollars to approach our goal of data collection in a shorter timeframe), but for a government that is probably totally doable.

First, you need a few hundred million dollars.