Putin's Troll Factories

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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby Searcher08 » Sun Oct 11, 2015 10:06 pm

AlicetheKurious » Wed Oct 07, 2015 9:26 am wrote:

This article is typical of why I've become so sickened by the West's "alternative" and pseudo-Left media: it cloaks itself in the language of enlightenment and opposition to Empire, only to provide a vehicle for the Empire's own most vicious, lying propaganda. Over the past few years, I've come to the conclusion that the difference between the mainstream and the so-called alternative is only that each is tailored to appeal to a different audience, but that the purpose of both is to disseminate the exact same poison.


Yes.
And much of this is directly traceable to Soros organisations. I was frankly amazed, after some intensive researching, at how much of the European "anti-fascist" ecosystem takes place in the soil of Open Society Foundations. Academics, publishers, consultancies, institutes all cross-pollinating and most with direct ties to western intel services and Likudniks. These links are consistently greeted with the following response:
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby Sounder » Mon Oct 12, 2015 6:45 am

Tumbleweeds make sense as a response. I mean, who wants to admit that they are taken in by a billion dollar trolling operation. Some even going so far as to actively promote the social destructuring aims of imperialist operators.

This in the name of building 'better' society?

Anyway, there may be a bit of projection involved in the OP.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby AlicetheKurious » Tue Oct 13, 2015 6:45 am

I really enjoy reading well-written books about history. In some cases, depending on the author's perspective, some issues develop into a mutually contradictory "he said, she said" tangle that needs to be sorted out, which can be a delightful exercise in critical thinking and research. We're all in a very, very long-running soap opera, and there's no substitute for knowing about the past to help us put the present in context.

But for knowledge of current events, I watch a lot of international news channels, from various countries, flipping through channels and listening while I'm in the kitchen, or doing household chores. It's really fascinating to see how the same events are covered by the diverse "sides", although on global issues there's usually hardly any difference at all in the coverage of, say, BBC World and France 24 (although that's not always true) and CNN and other Western news channels.

Over time, you develop a sense for whom to believe about what. For example, Iran's PressTV is very enlightening about some things, especially about economic inequality and corporate malfeasance in the West and in Latin America and Africa, and grossly dishonest about others, but its dishonesty is of a certain kind: it typically just leaves out inconvenient facts. Just to mention one example close to (my) home, a recent poll taken in Egypt found that Egyptian respondents listed Israel as the country most threatening to Egypt's security, with Iran a close second. PressTV touted the findings for a whole day, mentioning only that Egyptians perceive Israel as the greatest threat to their security. They never mentioned who was number two. This is typical. They rarely outright lie or fabricate things, the way Al-Jazeera and so many others do, but they routinely lie by omission, providing a very distorted picture.

Still, every propaganda outlet (and make no mistake: all media outlets exist primarily to propagate the narrative that serves its owners) provides a piece of the puzzle, even if, in some cases, this consists mainly in exposing the utter incompetence of the propagandists, and their contempt for the audience's intelligence. Because that is also very informative.

It's safe to say that countries invest hundreds of millions of dollars to sway public perceptions in their favor regardless of any moral considerations, and no country is always on the side of the angels. But in recent weeks, I've been more and more interested in watching Russia Today, especially its Arabic version, which airs discussions and debates between analysts from all over the region and the world, not all of whom agree with Russian policy, though most do. The reason is that with time, I find myself not only better able to understand events and seemingly sudden changes that otherwise would not make any sense, but also to predict with a reasonable degree of certainty where things are heading. And that's the only test that counts in establishing a media outlet's credibility and expanding its audience, thus rendering its propaganda more effective.

So ironically, honesty and accuracy serve a country's propaganda purposes better than lying and fabrications. Unless that's not possible, of course, because the country's agenda is in fact a criminal one. So then it becomes trapped in an expensive cycle of futility, forced to expend more and more resources to peddle lies that are more and more threadbare, which in turn further destroy its ability to persuade, forcing it to spend even more. Because what choice is there? Telling the truth would badly damage its ability to maneuver. But telling bigger and bigger lies that are continuously exposed by others is doing that anyway. It's a dilemma. And thus, we learn that the US and its Western allies intend to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to set up additional channels and other media, including a Russian channel to rival Russia Today.

Anyway, the excerpt below helps to explain why Russia is currently winning the propaganda war, which it clearly is, at least for now, despite the massive discrepancy that already exists between Russia's resources and those of the West. Basically, it boils down to the fact that people eventually tune out when they realize you're lying to them, regardless of how much money you spent and how fancily you do so. And if it remains true that your money can buy marketing campaigns and sophisticated equipment, and even internet trolls, in the end global audiences will turn to the media that earns their trust and respect, and those can't be bought.

Winning the Information War

For now, the truth suits Russia. In Ukraine, there really are Neo-Nazis running the government and marching in the streets, just as RT has said all along. The BBC is perhaps one of the few networks still refusing to admit as much, even as mobs flying fascist flags clash with the police in Kiev where injuries and even deaths are now taking place. When something is transpiring in front of the eyes of the world, and yet the BBC still refuses to accurately report on it, people turn elsewhere to understand what they are seeing. RT, for now, names names and sends readers, viewers and listeners to where they can get more, and more importantly, relevant information.

That could always change for RT. But the BBC along with the rest of the Western media should serve as an example and a warning to RT, and other national broadcasters working to break the West’s monopoly over the flow of information. However tempting it might be in the short-term to bend the truth, in the long term credibility is far more valuable than gold, harder to find, and harder to protect. Wall Street and London have all the “gold” in the world, yet with it, they find it impossible to acquire the credibility they need to get people to listen to their side of the story.

And ironically, credibility doesn’t really require any money at all to acquire. While having studios, channels, and well promoted websites helps increase exposure (something money can buy) any credibility associated with that exposure is acquired simply through the merit of the writers and reporters involved. The human quality of those involved in the information war is directly proportional to the amount of credibility any given network acquires. RT and others across the South and East should keep this lesson above all others close to heart.

They are winning the information war, and this is precisely why. The Independent fails to mention that despite what they claim are large sums of money by Russia invested into RT, that the BBC alone is still funded more. Taking into account that the BBC is just one of several massive media networks maintained by the West, all of whom coordinate their narratives, Western spending on media dwarfs that of Russia many times over.

The annual budget of RT is estimated to be approximately 300 million USD. Compare that with the BBC’s World Service who alone is funded some 370 million USD while the US State Department’s Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) who manages Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and many others, receives annually 752 million USD. CNN alone consumes some 750 million USD annually. Then there are local “independent” media operations around the world funded directly by the US State Department through Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute.


The planet is essentially swimming in the lies of the US and UK. Clearly money and exposure is not their problem. Credibility is. The problem the US and UK face is that their joint enterprise upon planet Earth is predicated upon lying, deceiving and exploiting humanity. Telling the truth is not an option for them unless the basic premise they labor under was somehow changed. And because of that simple fact, their winning of the information war is not a possibility so long as their opponents use credibility rather than chronic deceit as their daily currency. Link
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 13, 2015 8:05 pm

08.20.15

Russian Blogger Finds Pro-Kremlin ‘Troll Factories’

Using Google Trends software, ‘Otakvot’ says he’s discovered the exact location of paid Internet trolls pushing Moscow’s line.

A Russian blogger has discovered that by plugging search terms into the service Google Trends, apparently the location of some of Russia’s notorious “troll factories” can be discovered.

Google Trends, released in 2006, shows the percentage of incidence of a search term matched to a geographic location.

Otakvot on LiveJournal came up with the revelation that abnormally high number of Google searches for terms like “Right Sector,” the militant ultranationalist group in Ukraine; or “Novorossiya,” the aspirational country to be formed out of parts of Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus; or “DNR,” the self-proclaimed “People’s Republic of Donetsk”; did not come from high population centers such as Moscow but turned up in Olgino, a St. Petersburg suburb.


The Interpreter has covered extensively the most notorious of the “troll factories,” the innocuously-named “Internet Research, Inc.” which moved from Olgino to 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg earlier this year.

Other areas with the highest percentages of such searches were Perekatny, population 244, and Yablonovsky, population 30,518—both suburbs of the North Caucasus city of Krasnodar, capital of Krasnodar Territory in southern Russia.

Otakvot noted that using Google Trends, it wasn’t surprising to find that a term like “tourism” in Russia turned up the highest frequency in Moscow and Ulan Ude, the capital of Buryat Mongolia, or “edible mushroom” was sought most often in Volgograd, one of the places where Russians have died eating poisonous fungi.

But when all the terms associated with the war with the war in Ukraine turn up in Perekatny, population 244, and Yablonovsky, population 30,518—both small towns in the Adegei Republic but also suburbs just outside of the North Caucasus city of Krasnodar, capital of Krasnodar Territory in southern Russia, it’s certainly odd.

There doesn’t seem to be anything known publicly in this location except for the Kuban State University, which isn’t known for research on this subject. So the hypothesis is that there is some kind of government or pro-Kremlin installation here that is monitoring media and/or engaging in propaganda.

It makes sense when we pull back from the map and see Krasnodar is in a region of high strategic interest to Russia—near the Black Sea port of Novorossisk and across from Mariupol in Ukraine to the north and Kerch and Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea to the west.


Continues at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... ories.html
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby conniption » Thu Oct 15, 2015 7:45 am

Axis of Logic

The Demonology School of Journalism


By James Petras

Tuesday, Oct 13, 2015


The major influential western print media are engaged in a prolonged, large-scale effort to demonize Russian President Putin, his politics and persona. There is an article (or several articles) every day in which he is personally stigmatized as a dictator, authoritarian, czar, ‘former KGB operative’ and Soviet-style ruler; anything but the repeatedly elected President of Russia.

He is accused of hijacking Russia from the ‘road to democracy’,as pursued by his grotesquely corrupt predecessor Boris Yeltsin; of directing the bloody repression of the ‘freedom loving Chechens’; of jailing innocent, independent and critical oligarchs and robber barons; of fomenting an uprising in the ‘democratic, newly pro-Western’ Ukraine and seizing control of Crimea; of backing a ‘bloody tyrant’ in Syria (elected President Bashar Assad) in a civil war against ISIS terrorists; of running the Russian economy into the ground; and of militarily threatening the Baltic and Eastern European NATO member countries.

In a word, the media have propagated an image of an ‘out-of-control autocrat’, who makes a mockery of ‘democratic’ norms and ‘Western values’, and who seeks to revive the ‘Soviet (aka Evil) Empire’.

The corollary is that ‘Western powers’, despite their peace-loving propensities and fraternal attempts to bring Russia into the democratic ‘fold’, have been ‘forced’ to now surround Russia with NATO military bases and missiles; to finance a violent coup in the Ukraine (on Russia’s frontier) and arm the Ukrainian putsch government and neo-fascist militias to ‘restore democracy’ and violently suppress ethnic Russian ‘separatists’ in Eastern Ukraine. We are told that US and EU sanctions against Russia were carefully crafted ‘diplomatic’ measures designed to punish the Moscow ‘aggressor’.

In reality, the Western media has relentlessly demonized Vladimir Putin in a campaign to further NATO military expansion and undermine the Russian economy and its national security. The goal is ultimately to force a ‘regime change’, restoring the neo-liberal elites who had pillaged Russia’s economy during the 1990’s and whose brutal economic policies led to the premature death of over 6 million Russians due to deprivation and the collapse of the healthcare system.

Putin: Demon or Realist, Autocrat or Democrat, Vassal or Independent Leader?

The Western media has backed every oligarch, gangster and fraudster who has gone on trial and been convicted during Putin’s term in office. The propagandists tell us the reason for this affinity between the Western media and the gangster-oligarchs is that these convicted felons, who claim to be ‘political dissidents’ and critics of Putin’s rule, have been dispossessed, and jailed for upholding ‘Western values’.

The Western media conveniently ignore the well-documented studies on the source of the gangster-oligarchs’ wealth: The violent and illegal seizure of multi-billion dollars-worth of natural resources (aluminum, oil and gas), banks, factories, pension funds and real estate. During the Yeltsin period the oligarchs controlled thousands of armed gangsters and engaged in internal warfare during which thousands were killed, including top government regulators, police officials and journalists who dared to oppose or expose their pillage and property grabs.

Putin’s prosecution of a mere fraction of the most notorious oligarch-gangsters has won the support of the vast majority of Russian citizens because it represents a return to law and order and the return of stolen public wealth.

Only the Western media has dared to refer to these convicted felons as ‘political victims and reformers’. They did so because the oligarchs had become the most loyal and submissive assets in the US and EU governments’ efforts to convert Russia into an irreversibly weak vassal state.

The Western media constantly refer to President Putin as the‘authoritarian ruler’, despite the fact that he has been repeatedly elected by large majorities in competitive elections against Western backed and funded candidates. His popularity is attested to by opinion polls conducted by Western agencies.

In 2015, President Putin’s support soared to over 85%. The pro-Western Russian neo-liberal politicians scored in the low single digits according to the same independent polls.

Clearly the Russian public does not want to return to the poverty and chaos of the Western-backed gangster politics of the 1990’s.

Whatever reservations working and middle class Russians have over President Putin’s style of decision-making, they clearly value his crackdown on gangster-controlled elections, Chechen terrorism, and his restoration of Russian military defense of its frontiers, including the annexation of Crimea, following the US-engineered coup in Ukraine.

Every day, the Western media recycle reports of the ‘decline and demise’ of the Russian economy, blaming ‘statist’ mismanagement of the economy by Putin. They claim ‘declining living standards’, the ‘negative growth’ of the economy and the ‘growing isolation’ of an ‘expansionist’ Russia in the face of Western sanctions.

These media claims are laughable. Readily available data demonstrate that living standards of the vast majority of Russian citizens have significantly increased under President Putin’s administration, especially after the utter collapse under the free marketers of the1990’s. Russian workers receive their pay, pensioners their pensions, enterprises their loans – on time. During the ‘free market’ days of Boris Yeltsin, workers went up to a year without pay, pensioners were selling their heirlooms in the street to survive and enterprises paid extortionate interest rates to oligarch-gangster controlled banks! Comparative data, easily obtained, are deliberately ignored by the mass media because it doesn’t fit the demonological narrative.

The mass media present the neo-liberal ‘opposition’ and ‘liberal critics’ as Russian democrats defending ‘Western values’. They forget to mention that these ‘liberal critics’ have been directly funded by Western foundations (National Endowment for Democracy, Soros Foundation, etc.) and Russian non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) with longstanding ties to US and EU governments, intelligence agencies and exiled Russian billionaires. The so-called ‘Russian’ democratic opposition revealed their abject servility to Western interests when they openly supported the Ukrainian coup and Kiev’s bloody assault on ethnic Russian-Ukrainians in the eastern ‘Donbas’ regions of Donetsk, Luhansk and Odessa. Whatever shreds of respectability and credibility the ‘democratic opposition’ retained with the Russian public, up to that point, was lost. They were seen for what they are: propaganda arms of Western imperialism and mouth-pieces for neo-fascists.

The Western mass media charge Putin’s government with the same crimes that their own governments commit. After the US State Department’s Victoria Nuland admitted to channeling $5 billion to fund the 2014 coup in Ukraine and after the Polish regime boasted of training far right street fighters, whose mob violence served as a pretext for the coup, and after neo-fascist coalition partners in Odessa of burned alive four dozen ethnic Russian-Ukrainian citizens opposed to the coup, the Western mass media accused Putin of ‘intervening’ in Ukraine. This was because Russia had convoked a referendum in Crimea, in which over 80% of the electorate voted to secede from the illegitimate Ukrainian coup regime and rejoin Russia.

In truth, the Putin government is a victim of the Western power grab in the Ukraine, with Russia having to absorbed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russian refugees driven out of the Donbas, yet the Western media portray Putin as the executioner. Meanwhile the Western coup-makers and their far-right allies are depicted as victims… forced to bomb and decimate the Donbas region.

The charade continued. The Western media portray the subsequent punitive, economic sanctions imposed by the expansionist US and EU on Russia as a result of Putin’s ‘aggression’, referring to Russia’s defense of Crimea’s self-determination and the rights of the millions of bilingual ethnic Russian citizens of Ukraine.

The absurdity and convoluted nature of Western demonological propaganda has reached new even more bizarre heights with their hysteria against Russia’s military support of the secular Syrian government against ISIS and other jihadi terrorists.

The Western mass media have launched a global campaign charging that the Russian air force bombs ‘non-ISIS military bases’, presumably the bases of Western-backed ‘friendly’ jihadi terrorists. This ridiculous ‘reportage’ and its accompanying ‘photos’ were published before the Russian air strikes even took place!!

Apparently timing doesn’t matter in Washington’s ‘alternative universe of lies’!

NATO passed its political line to the media that Russian support for the legitimate regime of President Assad must be discredited; that the Russian presence is ‘provocative’ and responsible for ‘creating tensions’ in the region – after years of Western-sponsored jihadi terrorism against Syria!

Obedient to its masters, the Western media breathlessly ‘reported’ that the Russians were ‘really’ engaged in Syria in order destroy the pro-Western ‘fighters’ leaving ISIS alone.

No credible evidence for this propaganda was ever presented. They trotted out aerial photos of wreckage, which had likely been lifted from previous US bombings.

The media’s clumsy execution of the Pentagon’s line managed to embarrass even the US Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, who backed off of such claims and called for an explanation from Russia. Even Secretary Kerry, who now seeks to secure Putin’s military support for the US against ISIS while withdrawing Russia’s political backing of President Assad, has cautioned the media to modify its line, now that the US favors ‘greater coordination’ with Russia – but under US leadership. The media has recently conformed to this line, although it has not managed to explain how Washington could now work with the demonic President Putin.

Conclusion

Western media is engaged in an intense long-term propaganda campaign to demonize President Putin. Its role is to convince world public opinion and world leaders to blindly follow the US and EU, as well as their ‘allies’ and vassal states, in a campaign to degrade and undermine Russia, and consolidate a unipolar empire under US tutelage.

The Western mass media is important; but it must be remembered that the media is an instrument of imperial state power. Its lies and fabrications, its demonization of leaders, like President Putin, are one part of a global military offensive to establish dominance and to destroy adversaries.

The more intense the imperial campaign, the riskier the power grab, the greater the need to demonize the victims.

This explains how the escalation of the rabid anti-Putin propaganda campaign coincides with the single biggest Western power grab – the Ukraine coup (‘regime change’) – since West Germany annexed East Germany, and NATO and the EU incorporated the Baltic States, Eastern Europe and the Balkans into the West’s strategic alliance. The West’s bloody break-up of the Yugoslav federation was part of this strategic program.

The problem with the Western demonization of adversaries, whether it is Russia, Iran and China today, or earlier Cuba, Libya and Yemen in the past, is that Washington and the EU face severe economic crises at home and military defeats abroad by armed Islamic and nationalist resistance movements.

The US had invested hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up a shaky puppet regime in US-occupied Iraq, yet the US-trained and supplied Iraqi Army fled as the Baathist-Islamist ‘ISIS’ quickly over-ran half the country.

US troops have occupied Afghanistan for fourteen years, losing tens of thousands of lives and limbs and yet the nationalist-Islamist Taliban can easily take over Afghanistan’s third largest city, Kunduz (population 300,000), and occupies three quarters of the rest of the countryside.

Libya and Somalia are a disaster. And still Washington allocates a half billion dollars to train pro-Western mercenaries to overthrow Syria’s President Assad – mercenaries who give up their arms or join ISIS the moment they cross the border from Jordan or Turkey. The US trained mercenaries have handed over untold millions of dollars worth of heavy and light weapons and armored carriers to ISIS and Al Qaeda. The EU and the US face the dismal reality that Libya, Somalia and Syria are over-run by anti-Western Islamic fighters.

In Asia, China is demonized in the Western media, portrayed as being on the verge of collapse, facing a hard landing, even as China grows at 7%. The Western media wring their collective hands over the crisis in China while Beijing finances two new international development banks for $100 billion, raises its contribution to the IMF and brings 50 countries, including most of the EU but minus the US and Japan, into a new infrastructure lending institution.

Two big questions face the US and EU:

~~ Why do the Western media launch a campaign of demonizationthat doesn’t correspond to reality?
~~ What is the goal of such demonization, which objectively undermines the possibility of forming tactical alliances to end the US’ military losses, political defeats and diplomatic isolation?

The US needs Russia to defeat ISIS.

For Moscow, the fight against ISIS is crucial to Russian national security: Thousands of Chechen terrorists (some trained by the US) are fighting with ISIS and threaten to return to the Caucuses and terrorize Russia. Unlike the US public’s opposition to Washington’s role in forcing ‘regime change’ in Syria, the Russian public supports Moscow’s military support for the Syrian government because the Chechens’ campaign of terror within Russia, especially the 2004 massacre of hundreds of school children, teachers and parents in Beslan, is seared into their memory – a fact conveniently ignored by Western media when it ‘sympathizes’ with Chechen ‘freedom fighters’.

In reality, Washington should have a common interest to ally with Russia in the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. However Obama is committed to ousting Assad (Russia’s ally) to expand US dominance in the Middle East in partnership with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Clearly there are insurmountable contradictions between short-term military objectives (fighting ISIS) and strategic imperial political imperatives (consolidating US-Israeli hegemony over the Middle East and Iran).

Washington has moved to end its isolation in Latin America by re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba. Meanwhile, Washington retains the economic blockade of Cuba and its huge US military base in Guantanamo. Cuba is seen as a tactical political ally in ‘moderating’ the leftist government of Venezuela and pressuring the Colombian FARC to disarm, even as Washington deepens its military presence in the continent.

Obama signed off on a nuclear agreement with Iran (but the crippling sanctions and blockade remain in place) in order to secure Tehran’s support for the war against ISIS in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Temporarily, the Western mass media has ‘toned-down’ its demonological reporting on Iran and Cuba, for tactical purposes.

The Obama regime has adopted a ‘good cop/bad cop’ (or schizophrenic) posture with Russia on Syria – Secretary of State John Kerry speaks of joint co-operation with Moscow while Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter proposes to militarily confront ‘Russian aggression’. The media hasn’t made the switch because they don’t know which orders to obey or which line to ‘parrot’.

In the meantime, the domestic economic crisis deepens, ISIS advances, the Taliban approaches Kabul, the Russians are arming and defending President Assad and millions of refugees, fleeing the war zones, have over- run Europe. European border wars are raging. And Obama wrings his hands in impotence. Demonology offers no allies, no solutions and no positive path to peace and co-existence.


Note:
James Petras's latest books include:

James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (2014), Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s New Frontier, published by Brill (Leiden/Boston) (Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series).
James Petras (2014), The Politics of Empire: The US, Israel and the Middle East, published by Clarity Press, Atlanta.



© Copyright 2015 by AxisofLogic.com

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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Sun Oct 18, 2015 2:03 pm

Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America

The adventures of Russian agents like The Ghost of Marius the Giraffe, Gay Turtle, and Ass — exposed for the first time.

posted on Jun. 2, 2014

Max Seddon


Image

Russia’s campaign to shape international opinion around its invasion of Ukraine has extended to recruiting and training a new cadre of online trolls that have been deployed to spread the Kremlin’s message on the comments section of top American websites.

Plans attached to emails leaked by a mysterious Russian hacker collective show IT managers reporting on a new ideological front against the West in the comments sections of Fox News, Huffington Post, The Blaze, Politico, and WorldNetDaily.

The bizarre hive of social media activity appears to be part of a two-pronged Kremlin campaign to claim control over the internet, launching a million-dollar army of trolls to mold American public opinion as it cracks down on internet freedom at home.

“Foreign media are currently actively forming a negative image of the Russian Federation in the eyes of the global community,” one of the project’s team members, Svetlana Boiko, wrote in a strategy document. “Additionally, the discussions formed by comments to those articles are also negative in tone
.
“Like any brand formed by popular opinion, Russia has its supporters (‘brand advocates’) and its opponents. The main problem is that in the foreign internet community, the ratio of supporters and opponents of Russia is about 20/80 respectively.”

The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.

They are to post messages along themes called “American Dream” and “I Love Russia.” The archetypes for the accounts are called Handkerchief, Gay Turtle, The Ghost of Marius the Giraffe, Left Breast, Black Breast, and Ass, for reasons that are not immediately clear.

According to the documents, which are attached to several hundred emails sent to the project’s leader, Igor Osadchy, the effort was launched in April and is led by a firm called the Internet Research Agency. It’s based in a Saint Petersburg suburb, and the documents say it employs hundreds of people across Russia who promote Putin in comments on Russian blogs.

Osadchy told BuzzFeed he had never worked for the Internet Research Agency and that the extensive documents — including apparent budgeting for his $35,000 salary — were an “unsuccessful provocation.” He declined to comment on the content of the leaks. The Kremlin declined to comment. The Internet Research Agency has not commented on the leak.

Definitively proving the authenticity of the documents and their authors’ ties to the Kremlin is, by the nature of the subject, not easy. The project’s cost, scale, and awkward implementation have led many observers in Russia to doubt, however, that it could have come about in any other way.
“What, you think crazy Russians all learned English en masse and went off to comment on articles?” said Leonid Bershidsky, a media executive and Bloomberg View columnist. “If it looks like Kremlin shit, smells like Kremlin shit, and tastes like Kremlin shit too — then it’s Kremlin shit.”

Despite efforts to hire English teachers for the trolls, most of the comments are written in barely coherent English. “I think the whole world is realizing what will be with Ukraine, and only U.S. keep on fuck around because of their great plans are doomed to failure,” reads one post from an unnamed forum, used as an example in the leaked documents.

The trolls appear to have taken pains to learn the sites’ different commenting systems. A report on initial efforts to post comments discusses the types of profanity and abuse that are allowed on some sites, but not others. “Direct offense of Americans as a race are not published (‘Your nation is a nation of complete idiots’),” the author wrote of fringe conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, “nor are vulgar reactions to the political work of Barack Obama (‘Obama did shit his pants while talking about foreign affairs, how you can feel yourself psychologically comfortable with pants full of shit?’).” Another suggested creating “up to 100” fake accounts on the Huffington Post to master the site’s complicated commenting system.

WorldNetDaily told BuzzFeed it had no ability to monitor whether it had been besieged by an army of Russian trolls in recent weeks. The other outlets did not respond to BuzzFeed’s queries.

Some of the leaked documents also detail what appear to be extensive efforts led by hundreds of freelance bloggers to comment on Russian-language sites. The bloggers hail from cities throughout Russia; their managers give them ratings based on the efficiency and “authenticity,” as well as the number of domains they post from. Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s only independent investigative newspaper, infiltrated its “troll farm” of commenters on Russian blogs last September.

Russia’s “troll army” is just one part of a massive propaganda campaign the Kremlin has unleashed since the Ukrainian crisis exploded in February. Russian state TV endlessly asserts that Kiev’s interim government is under the thumb of “fascists” and “neo-Nazis” intent on oppressing Russian-speaking Ukrainians and exerts a mesmerizing hold on many in the country’s southeast, where the channels are popular. Ukraine has responded by banning all Russian state channels, barring entry to most Russian journalists, and treats some of the more obviously pro-rebel Russian reporters as enemy combatants.

The trolling project’s finances are appropriately lavish for its considerable scale. A budget for April 2014, its first month, lists costs for 25 employees and expenses that together total over $75,000. The Internet Research Agency itself, founded last summer, now employs over 600 people and, if spending levels from December 2013 to April continue, is set to budget for over $10 million in 2014, according to the documents. Half of its budget is earmarked to be paid in cash.

Two Russian media reports partly based on other selections from the documents attest that the campaign is directly orchestrated by the Kremlin. Business newspaper Vedomosti, citing sources close to Putin’s presidential administration, said last week that the campaign was directly orchestrated by the government and included expatriate Russian bloggers in Germany, India, and Thailand. Novaya Gazeta claimed this week that the campaign is run by Evgeny Prigozhin, a restaurateur who catered Putin’s re-inauguration in 2012. Prigozhin has reportedly orchestrated several other elaborate Kremlin-funded campaigns against opposition members and the independent media. Emails from the hacked trove show an accountant for the Internet Research Agency approving numerous payments with an accountant from Prigozhin’s catering holding, Concord.

Several people who follow the Russian internet closely told BuzzFeed the Internet Research Energy is only one of several firms believed to be employing pro-Kremlin comment trolls. That has long been suspected based on the comments under articles about Russia on many other sites, such as Kremlin propaganda network RT’s wildly successful YouTube channel. The editor of The Guardian’s opinion page recently claimed that the site was the victim of an “orchestrated campaign.”


Continues at: http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/docum ... it-america
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 20, 2015 3:47 pm

The Kremlin's Troll Army

Moscow is financing legions of pro-Russia Internet commenters. But how much do they matter?

Image

DAISY SINDELAR AUG 12, 2014

Like many people with access to the Internet and a holster full of gadgets, Vladimir Nesterenko is living a double existence. In real life, the 49-year-old Kiev native is a published author and darling of the Ukrainian counterculture. Online, he's "Adolfych"—a Russian-speaking mischief-maker who uses his Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal accounts to comment, sometimes thoughtfully and often profanely, on the deepening conflict with Russia.

"I know a lot of Muscovites have little dachas in Abkhazia," he wrote in a recent post. "But could these Muscovites have afforded their little dachas if they hadn't gotten rid of the Georgians and turned a flourishing region into cheap fucking shit, like they're doing now in Crimea?"

On another post, responding to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's uncharacteristic chest-pounding over a recent round of Western sanctions, he scribbled gleefully, "Podkhuilo razbushevalos," a phrase, playing off Ukraine's favored insult of Vladimir Putin, that might best be translated as "Dickhead Jr.'s freaking out."

Adolfych is opinionated. He certainly has bad manners. But is he a troll? He says no. "I try not to lie. And I'm not on anyone's payroll." This, he says, sets him apart from the leagues of trolls who have become a noisy presence in the comment sections of media and social networks in Russia, Ukraine, and increasingly the West.

"I think most of these trolls are sellouts," Nesterenko says. "This is a category of people who I'm sure are paid some small amount of money, maybe $1,000 a month or less. But they're running legitimate blogs, they keep themselves busy. Sometimes they even publish something interesting. But when it's necessary, they also spread 'deza'"—shorthand for disinformation.


Continues at: http://www.theatlantic.com/internationa ... my/375932/
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby conniption » Tue Oct 20, 2015 6:13 pm

pando
(embedded links)

The Kremlin's comment trolls are real — as is the media's amnesia about them


By Mark Ames
April 2, 2015


Image

The Russian Trolls Are Coming! The Russian Trolls Are Coming!

It’s every cybertopian’s nightmare: Barbarian hordes, in the form of Kremlin trolls, infiltrating the frictionless, innocent democratic paradise known as “online comments sections.” Inscrutable Russian savages, riding under the authoritarian banner of Putin the Terrible, sneaking into our Jeffersonian E-den, corrupting and poisoning the once-thriving social media idyll, valued for its earnest, civic-minded three-pointed-hat conversations and debates, where the crowd was wise and fair and incorruptible. Everything those savage Russkiis ain't.

The story of how Kremlin trolls are being weaponized to subvert our hallowed social media first broke into the English-language media in mid-March in an article headlined “The Trolls Who Came In From The Cold” — published in, ahem . . . ‘scuse me, somethin’ caught in my throat here... published on the website of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Yes, that's Radio Liberty, aka “Radio Liberation from Bolshevism” aka the US government’s psychological warfare media outfit set up by the CIA during the Cold War, and covered extensively in Pando by Yasha Levine.

So yes, the irony here is thick as Bill Casey’s brain tumor.

And as malignant, considering how much this Kremlin Trolls story has gone viral, as they say. A few days after the RFE/RL story, BBC (gah! government again!) followed up with “Inside Russia’s ‘Kremlin Troll Army’”, before lobbing the story back to Radio Liberation from Bolshevism (RFE/RL), which published a long (and rather interesting) tell-all interview with a defector from the Kremlin Troll Army named “Marat.”

The two government outlets bounced the Kremlin Troll Army story back and forth enough times to create critical hack mass, leading to sensational followups everywhere from the tech press to Vice, the New York Post, the Independent, and today, The Guardian.

What makes the story newsworthy is that it’s a rare look into a secretive new area in the PR industry,which we’ve all had to suffer one way or another: paid social media trolling. There’s so little reporting exposing how this area of PR exploits and corrupts social media on behalf of powerful clients — thanks to the almighty non-disclosure agreement, the most powerful secrecy weapon since Beria was retired — and here we have the name of the PR company (Internet Research Agency), an address (55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg), and a Hollywood villain as the client: Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

And yet — for all the sensational shocker value of the Kremlin Troll Army story, it turns out that this very same story has been reported before. More than a few times.

The RFE/RL story in March that all of today’s stories stem from first appeared in a local Petersburg paper, Moi Rayon (“My Region”) not exactly known for its muckraking, which titled its exposé “The Capital of Political Trolling” complete with photos, YouTube videos, and internal documents and screenshots of trolls.

And yet — a few weeks before the Petersburg story and before the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty story, Finland’s own government news behemoth, Yle (Finland Broadcasting Company), ran the exact same expose — dated February 20, 2015:

Yle Kioski Traces the Origins of Russian Social Media Propaganda – Never-before-seen Material from the Troll Factory


...what kind of a workplace employs people whose job is said to be to praise Putin’s Russia? Kioski investigated the background of the secret office building in Saint Petersburg that is called “the troll factory” and followed the life in it for three days. Scrolling down, we get a Google Maps screenshot of the building on 55 Savushkina, St Petersburg — plus screenshots of trolling habits, exclusive Vimeo interviews and gotcha clips, all the stuff we’ve come to expect from every version of this story.

And wouldtcha know it, there are more versions of this story. Earlier 1.0 versions, including the Atlantic’s “The Kremlin’s Troll Army” by Daisy Sindelair— who happens to work for Radio Liberation from Bolshevism Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

And a few months before that, Buzzfeed’s Max Seddon published his big Russian Troll exposé headlined, “Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America.” Ah, those leaked documents — FOIA’d documents, leaked documents, we don’t trust anything but leaked secrets anymore. Seddon’s piece, published almost a year ago, exposes the name of the troll factory:

“a firm called the Internet Research Agency. It’s based in a Saint Petersburg suburb..."


Yep, that one.

And where did Seddon get his scoop? From a 2013 article in Russia’s Novaya Gazeta, exposing “Where the Trolls Live, and Who Feeds Them”.

It’s the trolling story that keeps on giving, with all the regularity of a herpes outbreak, but with no memory to go with it, because each time this Internet Research Agency story is reported, it’s more shocking than the last time.

Your typical Russia apologist will look at this and whinge as they do about the ol’ double-standard. And that’s certainly true: Israel is notorious for paying legions of social media trolls to wage hasbara PR wars with its critics. Ukraine established an actual Ministry of Truth and plays online underdog in its trolling wars with Russia, even though Ukraine hardly suffers from hostile western opinion the way its armed forces suffer on the battlefield against Russia.

It’s not just evil governments who corrupt and despoil social media — powerful private corporate interests from the Koch brothers to Big Agro to Libertarians to you name it, have been poisoning comments sections, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else in virtual DemocracyLand pretty much since these forums first appeared.

What makes the Kremlin Troll Armies different, I suppose, is that they’re the consummate alien invaders — authoritarian-minded bugs from their horrible bug planet invaded our Jeffersonian, horizontal, frictionless paradise.

And the upside is, we caught them! We caught the aliens through journalism, through leaked documents, through YouTube and Vimeo videos and Google Map addresses. It doesn’t matter that this story keeps running every six months, the same characters, same names, same address, same trolls. We caught the barbarians. That can only mean one thing: The crowd is wise. Our Jeffersonian social media paradise really does work.
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 28, 2016 1:31 pm

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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby tapitsbo » Sun Feb 28, 2016 1:46 pm

This is your creation, American Dream, I assume?
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Mon Feb 29, 2016 8:54 am

AlicetheKurious » 07 Oct 2015 19:26 wrote:This article is typical of why I've become so sickened by the West's "alternative" and pseudo-Left media: it cloaks itself in the language of enlightenment and opposition to Empire, only to provide a vehicle for the Empire's own most vicious, lying propaganda. Over the past few years, I've come to the conclusion that the difference between the mainstream and the so-called alternative is only that each is tailored to appeal to a different audience, but that the purpose of both is to disseminate the exact same poison.


Orlov is a Putin worshipper. He promotes Russian propaganda whenever he can. Not that Western propaganda is any better.
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby Searcher08 » Mon Feb 29, 2016 10:14 am

conniption » Tue Oct 20, 2015 10:13 pm wrote:
pando
(embedded links)

The Kremlin's comment trolls are real — as is the media's amnesia about them


By Mark Ames
April 2, 2015


Image

The Russian Trolls Are Coming! The Russian Trolls Are Coming!

It’s every cybertopian’s nightmare: Barbarian hordes, in the form of Kremlin trolls, infiltrating the frictionless, innocent democratic paradise known as “online comments sections.” Inscrutable Russian savages, riding under the authoritarian banner of Putin the Terrible, sneaking into our Jeffersonian E-den, corrupting and poisoning the once-thriving social media idyll, valued for its earnest, civic-minded three-pointed-hat conversations and debates, where the crowd was wise and fair and incorruptible. Everything those savage Russkiis ain't.

The story of how Kremlin trolls are being weaponized to subvert our hallowed social media first broke into the English-language media in mid-March in an article headlined “The Trolls Who Came In From The Cold” — published in, ahem . . . ‘scuse me, somethin’ caught in my throat here... published on the website of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Yes, that's Radio Liberty, aka “Radio Liberation from Bolshevism” aka the US government’s psychological warfare media outfit set up by the CIA during the Cold War, and covered extensively in Pando by Yasha Levine.

So yes, the irony here is thick as Bill Casey’s brain tumor.

And as malignant, considering how much this Kremlin Trolls story has gone viral, as they say. A few days after the RFE/RL story, BBC (gah! government again!) followed up with “Inside Russia’s ‘Kremlin Troll Army’”, before lobbing the story back to Radio Liberation from Bolshevism (RFE/RL), which published a long (and rather interesting) tell-all interview with a defector from the Kremlin Troll Army named “Marat.”

The two government outlets bounced the Kremlin Troll Army story back and forth enough times to create critical hack mass, leading to sensational followups everywhere from the tech press to Vice, the New York Post, the Independent, and today, The Guardian.

What makes the story newsworthy is that it’s a rare look into a secretive new area in the PR industry,which we’ve all had to suffer one way or another: paid social media trolling. There’s so little reporting exposing how this area of PR exploits and corrupts social media on behalf of powerful clients — thanks to the almighty non-disclosure agreement, the most powerful secrecy weapon since Beria was retired — and here we have the name of the PR company (Internet Research Agency), an address (55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg), and a Hollywood villain as the client: Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

And yet — for all the sensational shocker value of the Kremlin Troll Army story, it turns out that this very same story has been reported before. More than a few times.

The RFE/RL story in March that all of today’s stories stem from first appeared in a local Petersburg paper, Moi Rayon (“My Region”) not exactly known for its muckraking, which titled its exposé “The Capital of Political Trolling” complete with photos, YouTube videos, and internal documents and screenshots of trolls.

And yet — a few weeks before the Petersburg story and before the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty story, Finland’s own government news behemoth, Yle (Finland Broadcasting Company), ran the exact same expose — dated February 20, 2015:

Yle Kioski Traces the Origins of Russian Social Media Propaganda – Never-before-seen Material from the Troll Factory


...what kind of a workplace employs people whose job is said to be to praise Putin’s Russia? Kioski investigated the background of the secret office building in Saint Petersburg that is called “the troll factory” and followed the life in it for three days. Scrolling down, we get a Google Maps screenshot of the building on 55 Savushkina, St Petersburg — plus screenshots of trolling habits, exclusive Vimeo interviews and gotcha clips, all the stuff we’ve come to expect from every version of this story.

And wouldtcha know it, there are more versions of this story. Earlier 1.0 versions, including the Atlantic’s “The Kremlin’s Troll Army” by Daisy Sindelair— who happens to work for Radio Liberation from Bolshevism Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

And a few months before that, Buzzfeed’s Max Seddon published his big Russian Troll exposé headlined, “Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America.” Ah, those leaked documents — FOIA’d documents, leaked documents, we don’t trust anything but leaked secrets anymore. Seddon’s piece, published almost a year ago, exposes the name of the troll factory:

“a firm called the Internet Research Agency. It’s based in a Saint Petersburg suburb..."


Yep, that one.

And where did Seddon get his scoop? From a 2013 article in Russia’s Novaya Gazeta, exposing “Where the Trolls Live, and Who Feeds Them”.

It’s the trolling story that keeps on giving, with all the regularity of a herpes outbreak, but with no memory to go with it, because each time this Internet Research Agency story is reported, it’s more shocking than the last time.

Your typical Russia apologist will look at this and whinge as they do about the ol’ double-standard. And that’s certainly true: Israel is notorious for paying legions of social media trolls to wage hasbara PR wars with its critics. Ukraine established an actual Ministry of Truth and plays online underdog in its trolling wars with Russia, even though Ukraine hardly suffers from hostile western opinion the way its armed forces suffer on the battlefield against Russia.

It’s not just evil governments who corrupt and despoil social media — powerful private corporate interests from the Koch brothers to Big Agro to Libertarians to you name it, have been poisoning comments sections, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else in virtual DemocracyLand pretty much since these forums first appeared.

What makes the Kremlin Troll Armies different, I suppose, is that they’re the consummate alien invaders — authoritarian-minded bugs from their horrible bug planet invaded our Jeffersonian, horizontal, frictionless paradise.

And the upside is, we caught them! We caught the aliens through journalism, through leaked documents, through YouTube and Vimeo videos and Google Map addresses. It doesn’t matter that this story keeps running every six months, the same characters, same names, same address, same trolls. We caught the barbarians. That can only mean one thing: The crowd is wise. Our Jeffersonian social media paradise really does work.


The pseudoLeft seem to operate on the basis of combining both 'information flood' and 'signal degradation'. Copy Pasta by the metric fuckton, in a Rovian "while you attempt to reply, we will be moving ahead, doing more cross-posting duplicate Copy Pasta..."

Propose that both sides are "equally bad guys",
preferably using language that is full of weasel words and get out clauses for future 'I didnt mean *that*...' arguments

Passionately exclaim Motherhood and Apple Pie statements like
"Bad guys are really BAD. Fuck 'em"
Image
Her Majesty illustrates that if you are a Monarch or a pseudoLeftie, one can have one's cake and eat it too.

Just post apologias from the neoLiberal / Globalists who have been credited as "AntiFa Researchers"
using <cough>researchers<cough> paid for and educated under the very same NeoLiberal organisations.

Accuse others of what you are doing and fall back into reductionist tropes of being "evidence-based" and "critical thinking", and then howlingly ignore both of those approaches.

Cite really crap reductionist academic papers (a la the Sunnstein project) to further muddy the waters.

Never ever EVER look on your own assumptions, put forward a clear case or accept the existence of a different viewpont.

The hypocrisy of posting about Russia's "Troll Army" while supporting Hasbara and it's proponents here is something to a thing of beauty, terrible to behold.

Carry on.
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby Sounder » Mon Feb 29, 2016 11:12 am

Well, at least nobody here suffers from any kind of irony deficiency. :yay
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 18, 2016 9:32 am

Why Putin Is Meddling in Britain’s Brexit Vote

Image


While it is true that Russian state officials have carefully avoided any public comment, there is a clear pattern of agitation for withdrawal from the EU on Russia’s state-owned, English-language news outlets Russia Today, a television network, and Sputnik, a news site.

Analysis of recent news stories shows a clear bias towards quoting anti-EU campaigners in articles that claim to show balance. One news story quotes extreme right-wing Polish politician Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who says Britain would be right to leave the EU. (He also offers his support for Trump because “Clinton is supported by the Jews.”)

The propaganda is even more blatant among the recent op-eds on RT and Sputnik. Among them are articles claiming that the EU was the creation of the CIA and two RT pieces decrying EU “brainwashing.” The leader of Britain’s U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), who was instrumental in forcing Cameron into calling the EU referendum, is also a regular guest on RT.

“One of the main lines in Russian propaganda is that Europe is in decay, in chaos, that it is divided, becoming increasingly irrelevant, and obviously a decision by the British to exit the Union would feed that line of argument enormously,” said Joerg Forbrig, from the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Along with Russia’s official news outlets, secretive troll factories are pumping out huge quantities of propaganda. Low-paid workers create thousands of pro-Kremlin blogs, social media posts, and comments on local and Western news outlets. Diplomats believe Brexit is one of the latest topics of the trolls’ propaganda machine.

Sometimes Russian officials get involved directly. As Germany was seething with racial tension earlier this year amid the struggle to cope with an influx of immigrants, the Russian embassy in London tweeted: “German government threw their country under feet of migrants like a rug, now try wipe their crimes under carpet.”

Beyond propaganda, Russia is also known to intervene more directly in Western politics. “I do think that the Kremlin has been trying to reach out to the leave campaign. There may well be support but it will be very hard to find out about this because they will be extremely discrete,” Forbrig told The Daily Beast. “We do know that the Kremlin is also materially supporting other actors that have potential to undermine European unity, and the European Union.”

For example, cash and support was given to far right media outlets in the Western Europe. Voice of Russia, a state radio station that was folded into Sputnik in 2014, gave $470,000 to a French web TV channel founded by a former Front National advisor. The state-owned outlet also partnered with the Italian Lombardy-Russia Cultural Association, which was founded by the far-right Lega Nord.

Radical right-wingers campaigning for Britain to leave the EU were also invited to events hosted by Russia. Nick Griffin, the former leader of the racist British National Party, and Jim Dowson, the founder of Britain First—a far-right street party, attended a conference of neo-Nazis in Saint Petersburg last year.


More at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... -vote.html
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 19, 2016 4:48 pm

Effort to Expose Russia’s ‘Troll Army’ Draws Vicious Retaliation


HELSINKI, Finland — Seeking to shine some light into the dark world of Internet trolls, a journalist with Finland’s national broadcaster asked members of her audience to share their experience of encounters with Russia’s “troll army,” a raucous and often venomous force of online agitators.

The response was overwhelming, though not in the direction that the journalist, Jessikka Aro, had hoped.

As she expected, she received some feedback from people who had clashed with aggressively pro-Russian voices online. But she was taken aback, and shaken, by a vicious retaliatory campaign of harassment and insults against her and her work by those same pro-Russian voices.

“Everything in my life went to hell thanks to the trolls,” said Ms. Aro, a 35-year-old investigative reporter with the social media division of Finland’s state broadcaster, Yle Kioski.

Abusive online harassment is hardly limited to pro-Russian Internet trolls. Ukraine and other countries at odds with the Kremlin also have legions of aggressive avengers on social media.

But pro-Russian voices have become such a noisy and disruptive presence that both NATO and the European Union have set up special units to combat what they see as a growing threat not only to civil discourse but to the well-being of Europe’s democratic order and even to its security.

This “information war,” said Rastislav Kacer, a veteran diplomat who served as Slovakia’s ambassador to Washington and at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, “is just part of a bigger struggle.” While not involving bloodshed, he added, it “is equally as dangerous as more conventional hostile action.”


For Ms. Aro, the abuse increased sharply last year when, following up on reports in the opposition Russian news media, she visited St. Petersburg to investigate the workings of a Russian “troll factory.” The big office churns out fake news and comment, particularly on Ukraine, and floods websites and social media with denunciations of Russia’s critics.

In response to her reporting, pro-Russian activists in Helsinki organized a protest outside the headquarters of Yle, accusing it of being a troll factory itself. Only a handful of people showed up.

At the same time, Ms. Aro has been peppered with abusive emails, vilified as a drug dealer on social media sites and mocked as a delusional bimbo in a music video posted on YouTube.

“There are so many layers of fakery you get lost,” said Ms. Aro, who was awarded the Finnish Grand Prize for Journalism in March.

As Ms. Aro’s experiences illustrate, Finland, a country at the center of Russia’s concerns about NATO’s expansion toward its borders, has emerged as a particularly active front in the information wars. A member of the European Union with an 830-mile-long border with Russia, Finland has stayed outside the United States-led military alliance but, unnerved by Russian military actions in Ukraine and its saber-rattling in the Baltic Sea, has expanded cooperation with NATO and debated whether to apply for full membership.

Public opinion is deeply divided, making Finland a prime target for a campaign by Russia.

“Their big thing is to keep Finland out of NATO,” said Saara Jantunen, a researcher at the Finnish Defense Forces in Helsinki, who last year published a book in Finland entitled “Info-War.” She said that she, too, had been savaged on social media, sometimes by the same and apparently fake commentators who have hounded Ms. Aro.

“They fill the information space with so much abuse and conspiracy talk that even sane people start to lose their minds,” she added.

Europe’s main response so far has been to try to counter outright lies. In November, the European Union launched “Disinformation Review,” a weekly compendium of pro-Kremlin distortions and untruths.

But facts have been powerless against a torrent of abuse and ridicule targeted at European journalists, researchers and others labeled NATO stooges.

Pro-Russian activists insist that they are merely exercising their right to free speech, and that they do not take money or instructions from Moscow.



Continues at: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/world ... .html?_r=0
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