Posted on 04/11/2015 5:26:03 AM PDT by WhiskeyX
MOSCOW -- For three straight days last weekend, the employees of the Novaya Buryatia newspaper in southern Siberia used scissors to remove an article from 50,000 copies of the weekly before it could be distributed.
The same article, which had been posted a few days earlier on the paper's website, was pulled down. (It can be seen in an archived file here.)
As a result, an article that was intended to clear up some mysteries involving alleged Russian military participation in the fighting in eastern Ukraine has itself become the center of a mystery: Is this a case of Soviet-style censorship? Or was it an example of the successful functioning of the Kremlin's notorious "troll army"?
"I think this is a case of censorship on the part of the security services because I have felt pressure from them myself," says Arkady Zarubin, a journalist with the Buryat newspaper Arshan. "They have tried in many ways to influence my publications and have even directly told me which ones shouldn't be published."
"I know for a fact -- they let it slip -- that they put pressure on other media, both print and Internet publications," he adds.
(Excerpt) Read more at rferl.org ...
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."
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