Putin's Troll Factories

[Searcher08]

Great that AD is sharing so many posts from the New York Times, Daily Beast and Huffington Post! lulz

[82_28]

I would have missed the articles were it not for AD linking them so I don't mind. My credo is post what you want. To say one more time, I have 0% problems with AD. Dude ain't caustic and obviously thinks that which he shares will be of interest. So he posts it.

[Sounder]

Your 'credo'? Sure, no amount of propaganda is too much propaganda.

82-28, you lost all credibility as our unofficial moderator with your sycophantic support of AD.

You might as well shut up now.

[82_28]

I don't know whether to laugh or launch into a sound disagreement with you so I'll just laugh and pretend you aren't serious. A member here knows him in real life and he "checks out" as they say. Personally, I am impervious to propaganda thus I don't give a fuck what AD writes or links to. It's what is on his motherfucking mind and he is free to do what he thinks. It's like every once in awhile I'll check out fox news just to see what they're up to. Also as to being a sycophant, um, yeah. What can I say here?

Nope. I only support that members are free to do what they must. While not the biggest fan of AD it comes down to my "credo" of leaving people be free of criticism. It's just links and text. Don't read it if you don't want to. RI has very little impact in the greater media sphere. And yeah, no, I have no plans to "shut up now" in the near future. . . Thank you for your honest urging to do so.

[Searcher08]

I would have missed the articles were it not for AD linking them so I don't mind. My credo is post what you want. To say one more time, I have 0% problems with AD. Dude ain't caustic and obviously thinks that which he shares will be of interest. So he posts it.

Well I'm glad but a little surprised that you found the articles interesting and informative.

Personally, I considered them hilarious propagandist BS, chock full of weasel words.

But pro-Russian voices have become such a noisy and disruptive presence that both NATO and the European Union have set up special units to combat what they see as a growing threat not only to civil discourse but to the well-being of Europe’s democratic order and even to its security.

This “information war,” said Rastislav Kacer, a veteran diplomat who served as Slovakia’s ambassador to Washington and at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, “is just part of a bigger struggle.” While not involving bloodshed, he added, it “is equally as dangerous as more conventional hostile action.”

http://www.cepolicy.org/partners Yawn. Left as an exercise to find Soros funders...

Personal aside:
Where were you when I was receiving so much vitriolic invective that the aforementioned 'caustic-free' flinger was banned for a month?
If you want to be R.I. bartender, fine, but that required fairness, natch?

Edited to add:

Laisse-faire for the actions of individual actors is not always the best strategy to use in maintaining the health of a system / eco-system.
Tragedy of The Commons scenario - degradation of the overall resource available.

[82_28]

You see, it takes all types. Believe me, I have had to talk other members here off ledges while being self same depressed myself. It does no good to hound people. AD is not here to disrupt. He is posting. I don't read the NYT on a regular basis so I would have missed the article. Probably had I missed it, I wouldn't have missed much, yet there it is. Something to read. Here's my thing and it's been this way all my life, I don't like to see anyone hounded for any reason and I always stick up for people who are being picked on -- sorry. We're all just entities sharing the same plane of what we call existence. As far as being a "bartender" my approach got me in trouble numerous times when I did it. I wasn't hardassed enough. But I did get shit for asking questions to co-workers that did not reveal my "RI persona" but everyone said oh, you're a conspiracy theorist?

All I could say was no. Because I'm not. Yet, that was not enough to persuade them.

[American Dream]

I'm noticing that those who are ideologically wedded to the defense of Russian Imperialism love to posit U.S./EU bloc Imperialism as the only and inevitable alternative: "You're either with us, or the terrorists". Well, no.

Mostly though, they want to move attention away from Putin's troll armies. Pointing out that the U.S., China and other states may also engage in such information warfare is beside the point, as are ad hominem strategies to distract and avoid, as well as simplistic arguments that seek to merely discredit the source of the news rather than the content.

[Searcher08]

I'm noticing that those who are ideologically wedded to the defense of Russian Imperialism love to posit U.S./EU bloc Imperialism as the only and inevitable alternative: "You're either with us, or the terrorists". Well, no.

Says the person who acts as a comment-free repeater station for Soros "Anti-Fascist" propaganda, except that seems to be going more low-brow with your current HuffPo, Daily Beast and NYT binge posting.

Mostly though, they want to move attention away from Putin's troll armies. Pointing out that the U.S., China and other states may also engage in such information warfare is beside the point, as are ad hominem strategies to distract and avoid.

Being accused of engaging in "Distraction from Putin's troll armies" is novel, not to mention that it implies they exist in some objective fashion outside some Slovak NATO shill's position papers.

BTW Wonderful usage of cloud words here: "ad hominem strategies to distract and avoid". Perhaps you could point those out?

I find it bizarre and hilarious that you post Soros talking points incessantly and then criticize others who point this out as being beside the point and distracting from the Soros talking points as though they have some form of 'objective validity' rather than generally associationalist nonsense.

[American Dream]

And there you have it!

[Searcher08]

And there you have it!

You didn't make any comment on the background of the Slovak NATO wonk in the article.
Is that because of his OSF connections?

[Searcher08]

As I suspect that there is going to be atroll army's worth of MSM CopyPasta avalanching into this thread shortly, I thought it would be worth bookmarking where this propaganda has emerged from. The earliest entry I could find that mentioned the phrase "troll armies" was here

http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/09context/propagandatrollen.html

This mentioned:

In June 2014, the private news service BuzzFeed from New York could intercept some documents of the Internet Research Agency, a company founded on July 26, 2013 in Saint Petersburg by Mikhail Kurkin, and headed by director Nikolay Churmakov.

This Master and Margarita website (named after a famous Russian novel) is run by this chap
https://be.linkedin.com/in/janvanhellemont

He also runs a website:

http://khodorkovskycase.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/lyudmila-ulitskaya-and-mikhail.html

Khodorkovsky was the Rothschild's point man in Russia.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article168007.html

[Sounder]

AD hilariously wrote...

I'm noticing that those who are ideologically wedded to the defense of Russian Imperialism love to posit U.S./EU bloc Imperialism as the only and inevitable alternative: "You're either with us, or the terrorists". Well, no.

I know, Russia is surrounding the western powers and destabilizing governments all round the world. Boy that Russian Imperialism is reeking havoc on the good and great peoples of the west. Hey, lets have a war so as to put those nasty 'Imperialists' back in their place. Surely the Russian people will rise up and support our well intentioned and necessary crushing of 'Imperialism'.

[seemslikeadream]

[American Dream]

Who knows?- Market forces may already be leading the big bosses empowered by the State form to seek greener pastures for the work they would have done:

The Bengali Click Farmer

By MAYUKH SEN



Factory-farmed likes rely on a global hierarchy that determines whose feelings count as real

WHAT’S the value of the Facebook like? Midway through American director Garrett Bradley’s nine-minute documentary, Like (2016), a scraggly, worn-faced Bangladeshi man asks this question—one that’s typically uttered by academics or social media strategists. Released at the end of March by Field of Vision, First Look Media’s documentary arm, Like concerns the cottage industry of click farms in Bangladesh’s capital city, Dhaka. Flush with cash, this pay-per-like market employs a $200-million-a-year silent workforce, where a customer can pay $50 for at least a thousand likes per post. Its workers, like the man asking the question, receive a meager monthly stipend in exchange for the labor, the emotionally deadening task of manually clicking Facebook’s like button over and over again for hours.

Bradley’s anonymous narrator attributes the existence of this industry to Bangladesh’s economic squalor, particularly among a class of recent young male college graduates. These graduates have lofty aims of becoming doctors or engineers or government employees. But the density of the country’s 156-million-strong population makes for a difficult job market. What becomes of the aspiring engineers or doctors who can’t make it in their desired field? They land in information-technology jobs, and some of those jobs happen to be on click farms.

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-ben ... ck-farmer/

[elfismiles]

It looks like Russia hired internet trolls to pose as pro-Trump Americans
Natasha Bertrand
Jul. 27, 2016, 8:23 AM

Russia's troll factories were, at one point, likely being paid by the Kremlin to spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media.

That is what freelance journalist Adrian Chen, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, discovered as he was researching Russia's "army of well-paid trolls" for an explosive New York Times Magazine exposé published in June 2015.

"A very interesting thing happened," Chen told Longform's Max Linsky in a podcast in December.

"I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what's going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff," he said.

Linsky then asked Chen who he thought "was paying for that."

"I don't know," Chen replied. "I feel like it's some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump to undermine the US or something. Like false-flag kind of thing. You know, that's how I started thinking about all this stuff after being in Russia."

In his research from St. Petersburg, Chen discovered that Russian internet trolls — paid by the Kremlin to spread false information on the internet — have been behind a number of "highly coordinated campaigns" to deceive the American public.

It's a brand of information warfare, known as "dezinformatsiya," that has been used by the Russians since at least the Cold War. The disinformation campaigns are only one "active measure" tool used by Russian intelligence to "sow discord among," and within, allies perceived hostile to Russia.

"An active measure is a time-honored KGB tactic for waging informational and psychological warfare," Michael Weiss, a senior editor at The Daily Beast and editor-in-chief of The Interpreter — an online magazine that translates and analyzes political, social, and economic events inside the Russian Federation — wrote on Tuesday.

He continued (emphasis added):

"It is designed, as retired KGB General Oleg Kalugin once defined it, 'to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.' The most common subcategory of active measures is dezinformatsiya, or disinformation: feverish, if believable lies cooked up by Moscow Centre and planted in friendly media outlets to make democratic nations look sinister."

It is not surprising, then, that the Kremlin would pay internet trolls to pose as Trump supporters and build him up online. In fact, that would be the easy part.

From his interviews with former trolls employed by Russia, Chen gathered that the point of their jobs "was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person."

"Russia's information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history," Chen wrote. "And its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space."

'The gift that keeps on giving'

From threats about pulling out of NATO to altering the GOP's policy on Ukraine — which has long called for arming Ukrainian soldiers against pro-Russia rebels — Trump is "the gift that keeps on giving" for Putin, Russian journalist Julia Ioffe noted in a piece for Politico.

"Life is still not great here," Ioffe reported from the small Russian city of Nizhny Tagil in June. "But it's a loyal place and support for Putin is high. In large part, it is because people—especially older people like [Russian citizen Felix] Kolsky—get their news from Kremlin-controlled TV. And Kremlin-controlled TV has been unequivocal about whom they want to win the U.S. presidential election: Donald Trump."

As such, the year-long hack of the DNC — discovered in mid-June and traced back to Russian military intelligence by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike — would seem to be the archetypal "active measure" described by Weiss, adapted to modern technology to have maximum impact.

"The DNC hack and dump is what cyberwar looks like," Dave Aitel, a cybersecurity specialist, a former NSA employee, and founder of cybersecurity firm Immunity Inc., wrote for Ars Technica last week.

That makes sense given Russia's partiality to weaponizing information — and the digital era's abundance of hackers for hire.

The leak of internal DNC email correspondences revealing a bias against Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — by WikiLeaks, an organization founded by Russia Today contributor Julian Assange — has divided the American left and made the Republican Party look unified in comparison.

Trump's seemingly shady financial overtures to Russian oligarchs have since resurfaced, perhaps as evidence that the real-estate mogul or his top advisers may have had a hand in the hack that made his opponents look so bad.

As Ioffe noted in a later piece for Foreign Policy, however, Trump's own influence among high-level Russian figures may be overstated given the difficulty that he has had throughout his career in securing lucrative real-estate projects there.

It seems, rather, that Trump is more useful to the Russians than they have ever been to him.

Even if — and it's becoming increasingly unlikely — Vladimir Putin and his intelligence apparatus had nothing to do with the DNC hack, that the mere suspicion has come to dominate American media is a huge propaganda boon for the former KGB operative.

"The very fact that we are discussing this and believing that Putin has the skill, inside knowledge, and wherewithal to field a candidate in an American presidential election and get him through the primaries to the nomination means we are imbuing him with the very power and importance he so craves," Ioffe wrote.

"All he wants is for America to see him as a worthy adversary. This week, we're giving that to him, and then some," she wrote.

http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-i ... ump-2016-7