Last night I watched "Full Frontal" with Samantha Bee, and they had this article:
[yt]OauLuWXD_RI[/yt][/quote]
Which I had to watch twice. It seemed like it was such a paranoid conspiracy theory that I wasn't certain it wasn't made up, but looking around on the internet and I learn that somehow I'd missed this story developing over the last several years.
The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.
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.
“The reason I’m hired is to make simple people change their mind about their vote and also about Russia,” the woman said. She later added that she identifies herself as an American housewife from Nebraska while online, and not as a Russian.
A Russian court has ordered a secretive pro-Putin “propaganda factory” to pay symbolic damages to an employee who sued them in a bid to expose the workings of the Kremlin’s online trolls.
The Agency for Internet Studies, which hired people to write pro-Kremlin propaganda from a nondescript St Petersburg address, was sued by ex-employee Lyudmila Savchuk for alleged non-payment of wages and for failing to give workers proper contracts.
Seeking to shine some light into the dark world of Internet trolls, a journalist with Finland’s national broadcaster asked members of her audience to share their experience of encounters with Russia’s “troll army,” a raucous and often venomous force of online agitators.
The response was overwhelming, though not in the direction that the journalist, Jessikka Aro, had hoped.
As she expected, she received some feedback from people who had clashed with aggressively pro-Russian voices online. But she was taken aback, and shaken, by a vicious retaliatory campaign of harassment and insults against her and her work by those same pro-Russian voices.
More and more, posts and commentaries on the Internet in Russia and even abroad are generated by professional trolls, many of whom receive a higher-than-average salary for perpetuating a pro-Kremlin dialogue online.
If you meet someone who is absurdly pro-Putin and pro-Trump, you should let them know they could be being paid for their efforts.
[yt]OauLuWXD_RI[/yt][/quote]
Which I had to watch twice. It seemed like it was such a paranoid conspiracy theory that I wasn't certain it wasn't made up, but looking around on the internet and I learn that somehow I'd missed this story developing over the last several years.
The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.
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.
“The reason I’m hired is to make simple people change their mind about their vote and also about Russia,” the woman said. She later added that she identifies herself as an American housewife from Nebraska while online, and not as a Russian.
A Russian court has ordered a secretive pro-Putin “propaganda factory” to pay symbolic damages to an employee who sued them in a bid to expose the workings of the Kremlin’s online trolls.
The Agency for Internet Studies, which hired people to write pro-Kremlin propaganda from a nondescript St Petersburg address, was sued by ex-employee Lyudmila Savchuk for alleged non-payment of wages and for failing to give workers proper contracts.
Seeking to shine some light into the dark world of Internet trolls, a journalist with Finland’s national broadcaster asked members of her audience to share their experience of encounters with Russia’s “troll army,” a raucous and often venomous force of online agitators.
The response was overwhelming, though not in the direction that the journalist, Jessikka Aro, had hoped.
As she expected, she received some feedback from people who had clashed with aggressively pro-Russian voices online. But she was taken aback, and shaken, by a vicious retaliatory campaign of harassment and insults against her and her work by those same pro-Russian voices.
More and more, posts and commentaries on the Internet in Russia and even abroad are generated by professional trolls, many of whom receive a higher-than-average salary for perpetuating a pro-Kremlin dialogue online.
If you meet someone who is absurdly pro-Putin and pro-Trump, you should let them know they could be being paid for their efforts.
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2foqKrN
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire