Salutin' Putin: inside a Russian troll house

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-inside-russian-troll-house

Shaun Walker in St Petersburg
April 2, 2015

Just after 9pm each day, a long line of workers files out of 55 Savushkina Street, a modern four-storey office complex with a small sign outside that reads “Business centre”. Having spent 12 hours in the building, the workers are replaced by another large group, who will work through the night.

The nondescript building has been identified as the headquarters of Russia’s “troll army”, where hundreds of paid bloggers work round the clock to flood Russian internet forums, social networks and the comments sections of western publications with remarks praising the president, Vladimir Putin, and raging at the depravity and injustice of the west.

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“We had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing,” she said.

Scrolling through one of the LiveJournal accounts she ran, the pattern is clear. There are posts about “Europe’s 20 most beautiful castles” and “signs that show you are dating the wrong girl”, interspersed with political posts about Ukraine or suggesting that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is corrupt.

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Instructions for the political posts would come in “technical tasks” that the trolls received each morning, while the non-political posts had to be thought up personally.
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“The scariest thing is when you talk to your friends and they are repeating the same things you saw in the technical tasks, and you realise that all this is having an effect,” the former worker said.

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“First thing in the morning, we’d come in, turn on a proxy server to hide our real location, and then read the technical tasks we had been sent,” he said.

The trolls worked in teams of three. The first one would leave a complaint about some problem or other, or simply post a link, then the other two would wade in, using links to articles on Kremlin-friendly websites and “comedy” photographs lampooning western or Ukrainian leaders with abusive captions.

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To add colour to their posts, websites have been set up to aid the troll army. One features thousands of pasteable images, mainly of European leaders in humiliating photoshopped incidents or with captions pointing out their weakness and stupidity, or showing Putin making hilarious wisecracks and winning the day.

Many of them have obvious racist or homophobic overtones. Barack Obama eating a banana or depicted as a monkey, or the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in drag, declaring: “We are preparing for European integration.” The trolls have to post the photographs together with information they can pull from a website marketed as a “patriotic Russian Wikipedia”, featuring ideologically acceptable versions of world events.

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After two months of working in the troll agency, Marat began to feel he was losing his sanity, and decided he had to leave. From the snatched conversations over coffee, he noted that the office was split roughly 50/50 between people who genuinely believed in what they were doing, and those who thought it was stupid but wanted the money. Occasionally, he would notice people changing on the job.

“Of course, if every day you are feeding on hate, it eats away at your soul. You start really believing in it. You have to be strong to stay clean when you spend your whole day submerged in dirt,” he said.

The most prestigious job in the agency is to be an English-language troll, for which the pay is 65,000 roubles. Last year, the Guardian’s readers’ editor said he believed there was an “orchestrated pro-Kremlin campaign” on the newspaper’s comment boards.

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He linked the move to a much bigger office with increased online activity around the Ukraine crisis, and said that while the trolling can seem farcical, it would be naive to write it off as ineffectual, especially in the domestic arena.

“People of my generation who grew up with the internet can perhaps spot the troll comments easily. But for the older generation, people who are used to television and are just getting online, they look at all these forums and networks, and it turns out that everyone else out there is even more radical than they are, than their neighbours are.”

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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/russian-trolls-spreading-online-hoaxes-u-s/

Why are Russian trolls spreading online hoaxes in the U.S.?
June 8, 2015

JEFFREY BROWN: We turn now to the blurring borders of the Internet in the battle for hearts and minds around the world that sometimes involves massive deception.

Tonight, Jeffrey Brown looks at a secret organization that’s working overtime to sell fiction as reality.

JEFFREY BROWN: September 11, 2014, there is an explosion at a chemical factory in St. Mary Parish in Louisiana. The video is soon posted on YouTube, Twitter is flooded with chatter, including screen shots of news Web sites, a local TV station, and, it appears, CNN’s.

A video surfaces of ISIS taking responsibility for the explosion and local residents receive text messages warning them of toxic fumes in the area. Big news, except there was no explosion, the video was a fake, as were the news Web sites that reported it, and the footage of the Islamic State group taking credit.

The social media posts were not what they seemed. As reported in a cover story in The New York Times Magazine, it was all the work of the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy Russian organization based in a nondescript building in Saint Petersburg.

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ADRIAN CHEN: Russian opposition newspapers have linked the Internet Research Agency to a man named Evgeny Prigozhin. And his nickname in the Russian press is the Kremlin’s Chef, because he has a lot of connections and contracts with the Kremlin, especially with the Department of Defense.

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with the hoaxes, there was one where they tried to spread the story that there was an Ebola outbreak in Atlanta when there wasn’t. And also in Atlanta, there was a woman who had been shot by police, and this was right in the middle of all the protests over Ferguson and Michael Brown, and it seemed like a case of trying to jump on this cause and kind of cause some panic.

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ADRIAN CHEN: I think the big picture is you have to go back to 2011, when there were huge anti-Putin protests in Russia. And those were all organized on Facebook, on social media, led by tech-savvy bloggers and readers who came up through the Internet.

And after that, it became a real priority for the Kremlin to basically crack down on the Internet, make sure that nothing like that happened again. And these trolls, this kind of work, from what I have gathered from talking to activists, it’s really to kind of pollute the Internet, to make it an unreliable source for people, and so that normal Russians who might want to learn about opposition leaders or another side of things from the Kremlin narrative will just not be able to trust it.