Social media, the modern marketplace of ideas, is vulnerable to manipulation. Deceptive inauthentic actors impersonate humans to amplify misinformation and influence public opinions. Little is known about the large-scale consequences of such operations, due to the ethical challenges posed by online experiments that manipulate human behavior. Here we introduce a model of information spreading where agents prefer quality information but have limited attention. We evaluate the impact of manipulation strategies aimed at degrading the overall quality of the information ecosystem. The model reproduces empirical patterns about amplification of low-quality information. We find that infiltrating a critical fraction of the network is more damaging than generating attention-grabbing content or targeting influentials. We discuss countermeasures suggested by these insights to increase the resilience of social media users to manipulation, and legal issues arising from regulations aimed at protecting human speech from suppression by inauthentic actors.
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