Do you really know if that pro-Trump meme or far-right tweet is from a real person, or just an unmanned string of code that was purchased for pennies?

Although bots—automated accounts on social media—are certainly not a new phenomenon, they have a renewed political significance. Part of the Russian government’s well-documented interference in the 2016 U.S. election included pushing deliberately divisive messages through social platforms.

Investigators found that hundreds or thousands of dodgy Twitter accounts with Russian digital fingerprints posted anti-Clinton tweets that frequently contained false information.

A Daily Beast investigation reveals manipulating Twitter is cheap. Really cheap. A review of dodgy marketing companies, botnet owners, and underground forums shows plenty of people are willing to sell the various components needed to run your own political Twitter army for just a few hundred dollars, or sometimes less.

And once your botnet is caught, due to holes in Twitter’s security and sign-up features, it takes only a few minutes to do it all over again.

“It requires very little computing power to fire this stuff out,” Maxim Goncharov, a senior threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Trend Micro who has studied the trade of social media bots, told The Daily Beast.

The crossover between companies offering services to promote brands and those selling Twitter accounts to criminals highlights a constant struggle throughout the Twitter bot industry: everything is murky.