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 June 3, 2014,.
Buzzfeed of all places:
Excerpt
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."
Absolutely the Clowns knew!
Know your competition ... LOL. CIA trolls are all over too. Operation Mockingbird never went away, and of course the mission was expanded to cover social media, comments on news articles, etc.
That'll get us a few more search terms.
The earliest documented allegations of the existence of "web brigades" appear to be in the April 2003 Vestnik Online article "The Virtual Eye of Big Brother" by French journalist Anna Polyanskaya (a former assistant to assassinated Russian politician Galina Starovoitova^[11]) and two other authors, Andrey Krivov and Ivan Lomako.And Russia while maybe a market leader, does not have a monopoly ...
In 2013, a Freedom House report stated that 22 of 60 countries examined have been using paid pro-government commentators to manipulate online discussions, and that Russia has been at the forefront of this practice for several years, along with China and Bahrain.
Russian-linked bots flooded Twitter with political propaganda in the wake of a deadly school shooting in Florida on Wednesday, according to data from a website tracking Russian activity on the social media site.
The article does not disclose which side of the debate the trolls took. Must be the trolls are pushing anti-gun propaganda, right in line with the rest of the US media.
Russian troll factory paid US activists to help fund protests - 17 Oct 2017
RBC said it had identified 118 accounts or groups in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter that were linked to the troll factory, all of which had been blocked in August and September this year as part of the US investigation into Russian electoral meddling. ...Google has said Russian operatives spent tens of thousands of dollars on targeted ads on YouTube, Google and Gmail, according to reports. Last month, Facebook released a statement saying it had found $100,000 of ad spending on about 3,000 ads that it linked to 470 "inauthentic" accounts that it had linked to Russia. The company later clarified that the ads focused on "divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum".
The company estimated that about 10 million Americans saw the ads, but interestingly also specified that only 44% of the impressions took place before last November's election, making the Russian campaign look more like an attempt to sow general chaos rather than a narrowly focused electoral drive.
"The task wasn't to support Trump," one of the factory's employees told RBC. "We raised social issues and other problems that already existed in the US, and tried to shine as bright a light as possible on them." The employee said that because Clinton was part of the current regime, she was also a target.