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.
Stalin-- uh, I mean Putin -- would be proud of their efforts.
I hope she carries a portable geiger counter. Polonium 241 is nasty stuff.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
If I get hired by these guys, do you think I have a shot at the Slashdot gig?
Imagine getting paid for
* First posts
* In Soviet Russia jokes
* Natalie Portman/Hot grits
* Old Ike stories
A good goatse redirect should pay big bucks!
What Snowden is doing with his time in prison, I mean Russia.. Working at a "technology" firm, making blog posts to keep Putin in power... Poor guy. It's just another way to make little rocks out of big ones...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
are called shills.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Why did Dice buy Slashdot?
So they could suppress discussions about their own scandals!
SHAME ON YOU DICE!
Are you trolling?
No, he is not trolling, he is merely pointing out the power of propaganda as mentioned by the OP. I believe it should be more considered irony given the context off this story
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I have seen on various non-tech forums some extremely biased and even absurd views from a very obvious pro-Russian government position. All these accounts seemed to work in unison, with the same talking points and a very clear agenda. The fact that their agenda was so clear and transparent is the reason why many forum patrons call them "putlerbot" and "Kremlin's sockpuppets". I thought that Putin most likely would not waste money on such nonsense, but I did find the comments humorous.
But now I am starting to think that these... "people" aren't just utterly delusional Internet users from Russia, but actual, paid-for, managed and directed sockpuppets.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Not really, no. Russian government shills are only used inside the country, to calm down dissent. They won't do their work on any English language website - what for? Basically, if you don't speak Russian, you won't see them. The only exception might be Serbia, but my guess is, you don't speak Serbian either.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The first rule of Fight Club might be "Don't Talk About Fight Club", but the first rule of The Internet is "Don't Read The Comments Section." There are very few exceptions to this rule, but most times reading the comments section on an article is an invitation for the worst of humanity's opinions to invade your brain via your eyeballs.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Unless they've been deleted somehow (Slashdot wouldn't do that, would they?), none of the posts prior to yours in this thread appears to be pro-Russian propaganda-trolls. There's a Stalin/Putin comparison (with a OT subthread ranting about Dice), a OT rant about Dice, an "In Soviet Russia" joke, a post distinguishing internet trolling from plain old propaganda (with an OT subthread ranting about Dice), and an AC calling trolling an artform. What's pro-Russian in there?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I've seen multiple posts now about how much shilling the Russian government does; with an unstated assumption that nobody else is doing this. I'd like to suggest the reader go take a look at the massive PR campaigns constantly waging on the internet to influence public perceptions. Does nobody remember stories we've had on slashdot about Microsoft astroturfing almost a decade ago? Or more recently how United Launch Alliance bought PR services to trash-talk SpaceX and Elon Musk to prevent them from getting government contracts?
My problem with these articles is that they come off so goddamn anti-russian; it's like propaganda in the reverse direction, and if I point out the fucking hypocrisy of calling out Russia for doing something like this while the US, EU, and various corporations get a free ride, I'm called a "russian shill", it's maddening that common sense is thrown away for the sake of "good guy, bad guy" politics!
I don't think many people even realize just how slanted these stories and comments look if you stop treating Russia like immoral mustache twirling villains and western-anything as proud defenders of justice and freedom and paragons of virtue. It's so comically black and white that it fucking blows my mind people on sites like slashdot still treat these issues this way.
Fuck, I hate politics so goddamn much. It's like it automatically flips off the 'critical thinking' switch in everyone's head.