Slashdot Mirror
Professional Internet Troll Sues Her Former Employer
baegucb sends a followup to the news from March that professional internet trolls were operating by the hundreds at factories in Russia. A woman hired to be one of these trolls, Lyudmila Savchuk, spoke to the media about her job, which led to her being fired. She's now suing her former employer and providing further details about how they operate. "The 'troll factory' operates based on very weird schemes, but all those firms are connected to each other, even though they are separate legal entities," she said. "I knew it was something bad, but of course I never suspected that it was this horrible and this large-scale." She describes how they flooded comment sections with pro-Putin responses, pushed out over 100 blog posts each shift, and doctored images to suit their employers' needs. Savchuk is now gathering activists to oppose this form of internet propaganda.
Why did Dice buy Slashdot?
So they could suppress discussions about their own scandals!
SHAME ON YOU DICE!
Why did Dice buy Slashdot?
So they could suppress discussions about their own scandals!
SHAME ON YOU DICE!
Someone might want to tell that to the /. members!
Disclaimer: If I'm mistaken and there isn't a anti-dice sentiment here, plz disregard :D
Requiem for the American Dream
are called shills.
This is wrong. As is the use of the word "troll" in the summary/article. Trolls and shills are distinct, and the difference isn't whether they get paid. You can be a paid or unpaid troll and a paid or unpaid shill.
Trolls post messages written specifically to generate responses. The term derives from fishing where trolling means to drag something through the water to catch fish. Internet trolls post baiting comments trying to get people to respond to them. Flamebaiting is a subset of trolling, where the aim is to generate angry responses.
Shills post messages to talk up some product, service, etc., trying to make it look good and its competition look bad.
Both categories also assume that the writer likely doesn't fully agree with what he or she is writing. If two people write the same words but one believes them while the other doesn't, the former is not a troll or shill, but the latter may be.
Note that paid trolls are pretty common on the Internet, but they tend to write the articles (or, on /., the summaries) not the comments. "Clickbaiting" is almost the same as trolling in this respect, except that a clickbait article is to collect clicks, while a troll article is intended to generate comments.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.