Posted on 03/16/2015 11:07:08 PM PDT by WhiskeyX
ST. PETERSBURG -- Last May, Tatiana N decided she wanted a higher salary than the average journalist can expect.
After responding to an advertisement in the popular HeadHunter job-search website, she became a Kremlin-paid Internet troll. Tatiana -- who, like others interviewed for this story, asked that her last name not be used -- worked out of a 2,500-square-meter warehouse in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.
The job paid 40,000 rubles a month, significantly more than the 25,000-30,000 most journalists make. But it came, she said, "with pain."
Tatiana joined a round-the-clock operation in which an army of trolls disseminated pro-Kremlin and anti-Western talking points on blogs and in the comments sections of news websites in Russia and abroad.
The operation, Internet Research, is financed through a holding company headed by President Vladimir Putin's "personal chef," Evgeny Prigozhin.
"So you write, write, write, from the point of view of anyone," Tatiana, 22, says.
"You could be [posing as] a housewife who bakes dumplings and suddenly decides: 'I have an opinion about what Putin said! And this action by Vladimir Vladimirovich saves Russia."
The roughly 400 employees work 12-hour shifts and are split into various departments. Some focus on writing up themes and assignments, others concentrate on commenting, and others work on graphics for social media.
One department is devoted entirely to maintaining blogs on Livejournal that intersperse banal posts with rough-edged pro-Kremlin propaganda.
The daily assignments -- shown in a document first published on March 11 by independent St. Petersburg newspaper My Region -- are usually drawn directly from pro-Kremlin media and go into sometimes excruciating detail about the message the bloggers and commenters are supposed to relay.
One assignment instructed trolls how to frame the February 27 assassination of opposition figure Boris Nemtsov:....
(Excerpt) Read more at rferl.org ...
We have enough of our own problems right here.
The primary, unstated goal of this operation is to spoof the Search Engines, primarily Google.
Excellent post.
Good question.
“We have enough of our own problems right here.”
A great many “of our own problems right here” have been instigated, financed, and/or exacerbated by Soviet-Russian intelligence services funding billions of dollars to its agents in the United States to indoctrinate American citizens and subvert our government with false propaganda and disinformation. As another FR post for today has observed, people such as the Democratic Party and Senator Ted Kennedy actively worked with the Soviet Union and Russia to subvert our government, our electoral system, and our own children. You do not fix our domestic problems by ignoring some of the foreign sources of many of those problems.
Every time the subject of the Russian trolls and propaganda is raised, the Russian Internet Trolls change the subject to someone else’s trolls instead. Let’s not change the subject and concentrate on the Russian trolls. We can discuss the American, Chinese, and other trolls in another post.
How many flame wars have we seen these Russian trolls initiate over the years because a FReeper dared to criticize Russian domestic or foreign policy!
Whoa. You nailed the dude in 11 posts. WTG.
Sounds a lot like the army of trolls Microsoft hired to tell us a bazillion times how great Windows 8 is, how their grandmothers and little daughters just LOVE it, how much faster it is when installed on a Pentium 4, how anyone who doesn’t like it has never even tried it, ad nauseum.
Putin will not be there forever, I foresee a better Russia in the next decade or two.
[ No doubt the Chamber of Amnesty has funded their own spin-squad of writers to troll FR in order to support open-border candidates that will increase H1-visas a million-fold the first chance they get once their chosen crony capitalist politician is firmly planted in the White House.
Once again, a certain, alleged ‘conservative’ proves this after he hired an open-border supporter of amnesty to head his communications and social media campaign. Just like climate change supporters do, they will vilify climate-change deniers as evil and worthy of punishment. ]
I was poo-pooed a few weeks ago when I stated that I was worried about the Walker man from Wussconsin. I feel sadly vindicated today...
[ So, what’s the lifespan of a lib astroturfer on FR nowadays? ]
Astroturf here seems to have unique electrical properties that attracts lightning so well it could be considered an eco friendly energy source...
Yes, I believe it was called The New York Times.
I wonder how much one could make opening up a NGO siphoning money from soros while making over the top libtard statements on web sites that hurt the liberal causes...
Because I think a lot of the absolute racist tripe wou see on news story comments seem to be liberal trolls doing a triangulation attack.
“Lost me with all that... sounds like something out of a bizarre sci-fi movie.”
It does, sadly, doesn’t it.
And yet, that’s the world we live in now. How do you think Barack Obama got elected?
TWICE.
Mix-in the calpihate’s agenda, and it gets even murkier.
LOL
This goes on everywhere, especially here in the good Ole USA. Funny thing is many do it for free.
Me, too. Those Walker Freepers are useful tools for the Chamber of Amnesty.
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