Bots and Fake-Accounts are a problem to be solved – that's for sure!
But there still is a problem about human infiltration as well, which should be on the future-agenda of steemit also...
A 2 year scheduled social-media-analysis of Munic University of Politics just released its findings today. Not Suprisingly they showed that US-polling-strategists are able to influence the public image of the candidates very well.
See the research in german language here:
http://politicaldatascience.blogspot.pt/p/somefo.html?view=classic
Additionally they found out that in Germany for example the right-wing-populisits are those parties who are most likely to take over the public discourse on social media.
In the same manner data-analysis of twitter detected that some accounts of these nationalist groups are blogging at office opening times only, what reveals them as proffessional politic-influencers.
Find more about this research-project here:
http://digitalpresent.tagesspiegel.de/afd
If Steemit is going to grow further this challenges need to be answered, I think...
Thanks @acidyo for starting this urgent discussion!