Former Russian Troll Wins Lawsuit Against Propaganda "Factory"

An anonymous reader writes: Lyudmila Savchuk, a former Russian internet "troll" has been awarded one rouble ($0.01) in damages after she sued her ex-employer claiming it was a propaganda "factory". A Russian court ordered the secretive agency to pay her symbolic damages. Savchuk claims that she and her co-workers at Internet Research were paid to flood websites with pro-Putin commentary. The BBC reports: "Ms Savchuk said she was happy with the result because she had succeeded in exposing the work of Russia's internet 'trolls'. Russian media quoted a spokesman for Internet Research denying the accusations. The Kremlin says it has no links to Internet Research's operations. Since leaving the agency, Ms Savchuk has been organizing a public movement against online trolling."

Comments

Re:Wow!

[Rei]

There was a truly excellent article on this "Internet Research Agency" group a while back. The ending is just brilliant.

Re:A Common Tactic

[Rei]

Israel's tack is usually different, they use more military censorship and pressure at home, while when trying to influence the US they use pressure groups like AIPAC and conservative Christian ally groups to pressure media organizations relentlessly on messaging that they don't like to encourage self-censorship.

Many countries have at various times used the technique of planting false stories in the media with fake grassroots groups promoting the message - Russia is hardly breaking new ground here. However, the more you read about the operation, the depths they've taken it to and the breadth of their usage of it, they seem to have blown out all records in terms of scope and ambition for such a project. Internet Research Agency alone takes up 40 rooms of an office building.

They work their employees on a rather slave-driver schedule, with 12-hour shifts. They not only have to post the troll stuff, but they have to spend even more of their time making apolitical posts to build up fake identities. However, once a mission gets launched, the cooperate large numbers of these built up fake identities into a single task, to overwhelm any voices trying to correct the record. For example, if they want to hurt the US oil industry by making people nervous about nearby plants, they'll make up a story about an explosion at an oil refinery. Then they'll have numerous fake news websites carry the story, and a whole fake corporate website covering it, many hundreds of these built-up twitter and other social media users forwarding it, claiming to have seen it, posting doctored photos of it, etc. Eventually the true story comes out, but many people never see the retraction, and even for those they do, they've put the scare into their minds about "what could happen". With the sheer number of employees they have, they can run several of these campaigns per day with fresh built-up identities. They cooperate closely with the FSB using hacks, blackmail, candid photography, etc wherever needed.

Russia never managed to compete with the NSA's dominance on digital snooping (not for lack of trying). But they've put way more emphasis than the US on message control, which is essential both for maintaining domestic support for the current regime, as well as playing a key element in their hybrid warfare technique (that is, lay enough confusion about what's actually going on that nobody can react until after the mission objectives are already achieved). It's proven very effective in these regards. They've also tried to use it to assist in foreign policy - to divide Europe on sanctions, to support pro-Russian political parties, to discourage Europe from seeking energy independence, to discourage the US from pursuing natural gas exports, etc. In these regards their successes are more questionable.