| This thread has been locked, it will not receive new replies. |
| Locked on 06/02/2015 1:17:24 PM PDT by Sidebar Moderator, reason: |
Posted on 06/02/2015 12:56:14 PM PDT by Brad from Tennessee
Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.”
St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?
If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------snip----------------------- The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
What?
Sounds like some group is sending out fake messages and blaming them on the Kremlin trolls. LOL
This is a heck of an article, Russia/Putin are treating internet trolling as they did other forms of propaganda during the Cold War, with huge budgets and effort.
As the articles describes, they are not just doing the Putin/Russia/military propaganda against us, but also injecting race and panic (Ebola for example) stories into the United States.
Somebody’s got too much time on their hands.
A June article by Max Seddon of BuzzFeed reported the Kremlin was spending millions of dollars to pay English-speaking Russians to promote President Vladimir Putin and his policies in U.S. media like Fox News broadcasting and The Huffington Post and Politico news sites. Trolls are reportedly expected to manage multiple fake accounts and post on news articles 50 times a day, often with sentiments as simplistic as “Putin makes Obama look stupid and weak!”
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-kremlins-troll-army/375932/
____________________________
Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america
____________________________
Paid as a Pro-Kremlin Troll: 'The Hatred Spills over into the Real World'
Der Spiegel ^ | June 01, 2015 – 03:48 PM | Benjamin Bidder
Important article about the soviet 2.0 troll factory
For later.
We have a few of these b&stards right here on our site.
The story reads like Mr Robot meets Rubicon. Jayson Blair was too lazy to write a story this complicated.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.