It seems that the article may have been targeted by the so-called pro-Kremlin trolls that patrol the Internet and spin events according to a script provided by the government. Recently, St. Petersburg blogger Marat Burkhard told RFE/RL's Russian Service about two months he spent working in a "troll factory" that employs hundreds of people working in shifts around the clock to push the Kremlin's message in online comments."There are production quotas and for meeting your quota, you get 45,000 [rubles]," Burkhard said. "The quota is 135 comments per 12-hour shift." He described how his team was tasked with posting its comments on "regional forums" based in regions across Russia.
Similarly, British researcher Lawrence Alexander recently used big-data statistical analysis to identify more than 20,000 pro-Kremlin accounts on the social-media site Twitter, most of them automated "bots" "designed to look like real Twitter users.
In a special report titled The Menace Of Unreality published late last year, journalists Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss write that the Kremlin's goal in its disinformation tactics is "to sow confusion via conspiracy theories and proliferate falsehoods."