The art of Russian influence espionage is called 'Active Measures,' and its principle is pretty simple: First, use socio- anthropological study to reveal the vulnerable points in your target nation. The divisive issues within the target nation, the hot-button issues—in our case, guns, race, abortion, crime, jingoism, etc. Then, up and down the ladder of espionage, exacerbate those divisions. That means everything from:

At the bottom, locating the useful idiots—the angry gun guy ranting on Facebook, the befuddled 'pro-life activist,' etc, and carefully feeding them false, or carefully massaged information that will inspire them to action.

Further up the chain there are 'influencers,' who are treated with a bit more care and feeding,

Still further up are people with national reputations—journalists, commentators, people like Matt Taibbi, or Glenn Greenwald, or Carlson, who you may have to pay, or blackmail, or otherwise seduce. (Carlson's father Dick worked as a lobbyist for years for Hungary's autocratic fascist Viktor Orban, if you didn't know that.) 

Even further are the lawmakers, who one definitely will have to bribe or intimidate, I think of people like Ron Johnson in that vein, and infiltrators in government, law enforcement, business, etc,  who can be found almost anywhere. Some will know they're acting in Russia's interest, but many will not. 

For the people who are just being manipulated emotionally to do your will, the QAnon types, etc, its best to think of the process as similar to salting a barren goldmine with gold samples to give them the impression they're buying an actual gold mine. Clues are planted, that then leads them to other planted clues, and then others, leaving the dupe convinced that they've uncovered some mind-changing truth through "doing their own research."

The New York Times made an excellent multimedia presentation of this process here:

https://www.nytimes.com/video/what-is-disinformation-fake-news-playlist

This is an op that duped me, with dire results, as it did Dan Rather and many other people, who then themselves become part of the "salt in the gold mine."

The first really successful active measure that I'm aware of was something called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery cobbled together from bits of novels and the like, that went from being something publicized in tiny journals to being printed into booklets by Henry Ford and sent around the world, and that then played a huge part in fomenting the anti-semitism in Germany that led to the death camps. The Protocols didn't emerge out of nowhere—rather they built upon preexisting tropes, anti-semitic myths dating back to the Crusades and then amplified by the Black Plague, myths which accused the Jews of causing, as well as killing babies so as to use their blood to leaven bread. (Later echoed by QAnon with its Adrenochrome/PizzaGate mythology.  The Protocols found fruit in the US through the radio show of the uber-popular Fascist Father Coughlin, who used a corollary, the "Jewish Banking Conspiracy" to (pretty successfully) try to convince Americans to ally with Hitler or just stay out of WWII.

So, this is a well-thought out tool, Active Measures, and it has allowed countries like Russia (And the US) to wreak havoc on nations around the world for quite some time.

Active Measures are targeted at the left, too, but that is less an issue at the moment, though we do see it working in what's called the Horseshoe Effect, where the far left begins to find common cause with the far right, which we see in people like Jimmy Dore, or Max Blumenthal, or Susan Sarandon, and now her ex husband Tim Robbins, I'm sorry to say.