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How Professional Russian Trolls Operate
New submitter SecState writes: Hundreds of full-time, well-paid trolls operate thousands of fake accounts to fill social media sites and comments threads with pro-Kremlin propaganda. A St. Petersburg blogger spent two months working 12-hour shifts in a "troll factory," targeting forums of Russian municipal websites. In an interview, he describes how he worked in teams with two other trolls to create false "debates" about Russian and international politics, with pro-Putin views always scoring the winning point. Of course, with the U.S. government invoking "state secrets" to dismiss a defamation case against the supposedly independent advocacy group United Against a Nuclear Iran, Americans also need to be asking how far is too far when it comes to masked government propaganda.
Which country is paying you to say that?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
It's only those damn Russians are doing this, all other countries are saint.
Yeah, because that makes it all OK then.
Your comment is designed to distract from the issue at hand, shut down intelligent conversation on the topic, and imply the wrongdoer is just fine because, by implication, "everybody else does it, too" (no evidence to said implication provided, certainly not proven, and probably not true), all without contributing a single creative or new thought to the discussion at all.
Nice job, (Russian?) troll.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Conversations in online forums havent really taken the bulk of social-political discourse in america, because we're all still convinced the news media is capable of objectively reporting wars and foreign politics. the administration, any administration really, has made perfectly clear that those outliers that do not fall lock step with the new york times, fox, nbc, and other household staples will be punished. Expect wiretaps, spying, litigation to uncover your sources, accidental shelling of your foreign offices, and outright disinformation and lies from both houses of congress. Expect Joe Libermann to pen a strongly worded letter to your hosting provider, as in the case of wikileaks, that insists you should be shut down. Credit processing will cease, bank accounts will be frozen, and dubious arrest warrents will be issued once you begin to report on the actualities of american foreign policy and interventionalism. during both the iraq war as well as the Afhan war, we censored news coverage of planes returning with dead soldiers. We didnt do it because of television censor standards, we did it because coverage of that nature led to mass protest of the viet-nam war. peaceful demonstration is fine, but whenever we grow tired of it we install agent provocateurs and quickly crush the manufactured dissent.
narratives contrary to the song of exceptionalism aren't tolerated. In fergusson as in occupy we routinely arrested journalists that didnt belch the days talking points for 20 minutes, and immediately knock off to the hotel bar for steak and booze.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Excluded middle much? Other countries may be doing this — or planning to catch-up — but Russia has been doing this on massive scale for many years — all the while, in a classic fit of projection, accusing others of it.
Another difference is, the US, for example, may consider such propaganda a war-fighting tool to be used outside, but Putin's regime — according to TFA — is happy to use it to prop the government domestically.
Then, I suppose, for knuckle-dragging simpletons happy to equate Joe McCarthy with Lavrenty Beria, none of the above makes any difference...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I believe the term is astroturfing, i.e., when someone is paid to write commentary in support of some other entity.
On various news sites, I see what are obviously paid Republican Trolls, Paid Pro-Koch Brothers Trolls, they come in day after day under various identities but having the same writing style, and post comment after comment (sometimes the same comment multiple times on multiple sites).
So exactly what's the difference...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Go to any major news site and click on an Ukraine story?
90% of the posters are about those American backed Nazi's out to destroy the freedom fighters who had enough of American backed oppression. It is stated so many times it is true that Ukraine is a puppet of the Nato and the US.
Really? How can anyone believe this. It is obvious Russian trolls. Also Crimea is a place with tons of political censorship and political prisoners now. All the comments say it is propaganda and paradise now under Putin. Uh yeah
http://saveie6.com/
I often wonder what percentage of responses on slashdot climate stories are made by paid trolls.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
So we have evidence of a government doing it, but can we get a whistleblower from the lobbyists/PR/Corps? In just a recent example, the amount of comments on many websites' (particularly right-wing websites, but even on some more mainstream sites) articles about Net Neutrality and Title II far exceeded the normal levels, and most of the comments were negative and looked to me like they were scraped from other sites or autogenerated, plus there were large groups of trolls that were using every trick in the book to drown-out or malign anyone who posted pro-NN/T2 comments. Aside from the rampant astroturfing, there were fake 'grassroots' websites and social media accounts that spouted the same anti-NN talking points.
I'm far less worried about government propaganda right now when the corporations and lobby groups are undertaking orwellian large-scale psyops to sway public opinion.
This has been going on a long time in China, though there the troll workplaces are decentralized and the pay's a lot lower.
Sorry, I forgot there are ads on the Web; I use Lynx.
On the other hand, the US has always had a rather loose interpretation of 'war fighting outside' which allowed for usage on disruptive elements of American society too. How much it is done is a big question though.
Compare our invasion of Korea with that of Vietnam only a few years later. Before you say "Korea was UN-approved" — no, that's a lame excuse. Stalin boycotted UN at the time action on Korea was decided, but by the time of Vietnam USSR has changed its approach. That's all.
In both cases American military was sent to fight in remote lands against people, who didn't threaten America directly in any way — for fear of the domino effect of Communism. In both cases the fighting was heavy and numerous war-crimes have taken place.
And yet, there was no domestic opposition to the Korean war — virtually none. No protests against the draft, no accusations of returning soldiers being "baby-killers". John Kerry, for example, has gained more political capital for opposing the war (and returning his medals), than for fighting in it (for an entire 4 months).
Vietnam was widely considered a national shame long before the war was lost. Meanwhile the only source of any negativity about the Korean war in mass culture was the M*A*S*H series.
Why was the domestic reaction to the two wars so drastically different? The theory of propagandists controlled and funded (with or without their own knowledge) by the USSR would explain the known facts.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Those are not trolls, those are sockpuppets; there's a difference.
I'm not sure what Fox News is except the biggest, most well known right wing troll on planet Earth. Russia just doesn't quite get how to do it properly.
Of course we are saints. We are the good guys. When we deceive the enemy with lies that this is only a tactic to prevent evil. When the Russians do it, it is to undermine freedom and democracy. Welcome back in the eighties, well maybe it is already the sixties. Those old top honchos in the US, UK and the rest of the west have secured another round with Russia with their special inferiority complex based politics. Both sides have hoped to get back to that. For a short time, they thought Islam might be a suitable evil, but that does not work very well when one half of the Muslims tries to kill the other half over things we do not really understand. True, I do not understand why we had that 30 years war in Europe over religion and power.
Sorry for expressing my opinion then you fucking asshole, I guess the community here has become so bitter this is what Slashdot comments simply are now. A bunch of shitposters and crybaby perfectionists like yourself. Fuck you
I accept your apology. Have a nice day!
Well, a nice high profile one would be the entire McCarthy era, and Hover's infiltration of civil right's organizations under the argument that they were aligned with communists.
Yeah, all the shills here are unpaid interns.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
So anybody who interrupts the anti-American, anti-West circlejerk is a shill?
Cold Fjord isn't interrupting any anit-American or anti-West discussion. He is disrupting discussions where someone mentions that we shouldn't hand Snowden and instead should hold people who work against the US population responsible.
That is Cold Fjord is anti-American and anti-West. He actively works against the things that makes the American and western values worth fighting for.
And no, anyone who takes that position isn't a shill, some of them are just retards.
The things that separates Cold Fjord from those people is that he only shows up in NSA related threads on Slashdot and he is so obvious that the only way he isn't a shill for NSA would be if he is a shill for some other nation that is trying really hard to make the US government look bad.
Either way, the result of his actions is that things get worse for the American public.
Yeah, this happens on Slash too, so apparently the Chinese astroturfing squad seems to lurk here as well. For example, in regards to cheating exams:
You have this guy mentioning that cheating test scores is also a big problem in China, followed by some more detailed posts as to why.
Then you have a response by an AC who basically says "oh it's just Westerners trying to make China look bad. We don't do that anymore! Look, I'm in the US now so I'm believable. Despite posting AC and having stereotypical Chinese grammatical mistakes common to non-landed Chinese astroturfers, modded +1
I point out that the previous response is an obvious astroturfer (aforementioned grammatical errors etc), and am modded down twice rather readily. But seriously, read the astroturfer's post out with a bad accent and it will sound like a Chinese villain from an old movie. The linguistic keys make it pretty clear the guy isn't somebody who's been living in the west for any length of time.
For the record, I have plenty of Chinese friends etc whom I've worked on language skills with. Missing pronouns is usually a fairly basic thing that gets fixed earlier on, as is the use of infinite verbs ("keep to spread" instead of "spreading"). So unless the poster had been living in Chinatown for the last few years, one would expect those language'isms to have cleared up by now.
Also, "flied lice", though attributed to a Chinese restaurateur in Lethal Weapon and added for humour, would be more of a Japanese/Korean language issue as they lack distinct "L" and "R" sounds in their language (or rather, "L" and "R" exist as single character/sound). Chinese don't really seem to have issues with consonant swaps in English.
Oh no, the USA would *never* do anything like that. To flood forums with US propaganda? The US are *so* above that. Evil Russians indeed are the only people evil enough to do that and evil enough to spy on their own people and evil enough to wage war on other countries to increase their hegemony over the rest of the world and evil enough to export their debts to the rest of the world through confiscatory taxation through inflation by holding the world's reserve currency. Only Russia would do that.
I find that most people I talk to don't trust US media. They don't do anything about it, but they don't believe what they are told any longer. Apathy works for a while, but historically this can not last. Corruption and abuse will get to a point where there has to be some form of revolution (not always bloody) and then the cycle will start over again.
To be in line with TFA's point, sure the Russian's have paid shills and trolls. Their play books are the same as our own Government's. Whistle blowers have demonstrated that most large US companies have paid shills and trolls, the US Government pays shills and trolls, as does just every "Western" Government including the UK and Canada. Snowden's leaks give us a nice powerpoint view of the play book, no need for anecdote and hearsay trying to vilify "those other guys". Nobody likes a hypocrite..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
In Russia it is a small government based operation involving couple hundred people. In US it is a wide scale, industrial operation, otherwise referred to as mainstream media and involves hundreds of thousands of people. In Russia the product is comments under articles, in US the product are the articles themselves. I don't think that we, in the US, are exactly qualified to complain about what the Russians are doing.
Just as one example, look at articles from 2008 to 2013 about Russia in the US mainstream media. It reads like hit job. There is not a single article published without a mention of some perceived problem in Russia, be it with Putin himself, so called human rights violations, free speech violations or corruption. Not a single article that would not spend at least several paragraphs on bad mouthing Russia.
And even if you say, those are justified, compare it to articles from 2008 to 2013 on Saudi Arabia, which has much worse record in every single regard. You will see the stark difference.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.