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Comment by phyller | Hacker News Reader

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/19/politics/russian-troll-instru...

Also, below is a recent article about professional Iranian trolls, but mentions that the same cybersecurity company has been tracking Russian disinformation campaigns for years. There are thousands of people in Russia, in Iran, in other countries who go into the office every day and earn their paycheck by trying to move opinion in the USA and elsewhere in a certain direction, or spread FUD.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/technology/fireeye-facebo...

> FireEye’s information operations analysis team was formed in 2016, when hacked emails from several political figures were beginning to appear on the site DCLeaks. “All through that period, we were tracking the Russian effort to influence U.S. elections,” Mr. Foster said. “Obviously, social media is a very important kind of medium by which these campaigns are undertaken.”

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yeah absolutely those people exist, I'm not denying it. But they're likely not the ones you've interacted with on twitter. Do you think Russia pays people to post inflammatory content on twitter, or to advocate for the Russian perspective like RT do? My money's on the latter.

> Do you think Russia pays people to post inflammatory content on twitter, or to advocate for the Russian perspective like RT do?

Yes.

Oh, wait, did you imagine those were mutually exclusive?

how on earth does it benefit Russia to pay people to perform the actions that 4chan people do? I can't imagine posting edgy memes and attempting to "trigger the libs" is a national marketing/propaganda/outreach strategy.

Because "trolls" is a horrible term for it. It's propaganda and sow discord.

Inflame the far-left and far-right, get people to distrust traditionally more objective sources of information.

Repeat lies on social media to reinforce desired narratives. Influence trending topics to direct discussion. All of this is fairly well known at this point.

There are even cases of "troll" accounts being accounted and coming clean and sharing their twitter engagement numbers for particularly effective "fake news" tweets before deciding their exposed account.

This isn't a few people in a basement it's a professionally run tech shop.

> how on earth does it benefit Russia to pay people to perform the actions that 4chan people do? I can't imagine posting edgy memes and attempting to "trigger the libs" is a national marketing/propaganda/outreach strategy.

Modern day Russia propaganda isn't about trying to convince Americans to take a Russia's POV or have a favorable view of it. It's about sowing generalized discord, mistrust, and internal conflict to weaken the US as a whole. Anything that inflames divisions is useful to that goal, even "trigger the libs" memeing.

if that's the case then surely Russia has agents masquerading as the far left too? After all if you're just pretending to be far right to enrage the left you're leaving half your strategy at the door.

> if that's the case then surely Russia has agents masquerading as the far left too? After all if you're just pretending to be far right to enrage the left you're leaving half your strategy at the door.

If you weren't aware, Russia did have its agents masquerading as the far left too:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-you-found-in-3-mil...

https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/russian-trolls-are-obse...

I wasn't aware, I've only really seen the usual narrative that Russian bots are acting as the right wing. Thanks for the links, I'll check that out.

> if that's the case then surely Russia has agents masquerading as the far left too?

Yes; that's well established (while it's less talked about, the 2016 operation included promotion of Stein and Sanders as well as the more intense promotion of Trump, and also included false-flag promotion of in-person left-wing and right-wing demonstrations at the same time and place with the intent of fomenting political violence.)

Russia’s government also had connections to groups pushing “Calexit” after the election, including those pushing it as a defense against Trump.

Russia’s government also has connections, and has overtly funded, groups seeking restoration of the Hawaiian monarchy.

see, this is more interesting. I'm British so while I followed the election itself fairly closely I'd only really heard the mainstream narrative on the Russian bots, that they were there to get Trump elected because Trump was buddies with Putin. The idea of them fomenting chaos on both sides makes a lot more sense.

I'm not saying I think the random jerk on Twitter is a Russian troll. Though random jerks on Twitter don't hesitate to label me as one. The reason I put "troll" in quotes is because in this sense it is a generic term for these professional spreaders of disinformation. They may be very pleasant, they may act like jerks, doesn't matter.

I'm not going to get into how I think they operate, but clearly they seem to be getting the results they want as they continue to spend their limited resources funding it.

I've seen people I suspect to be actual Russian "trolls" on twitter too. Generally they're profiles of very generic heartland Americans who post basically nothing about their lives but occasionally throw out support for one political cause or another. There's enough accounts like that that are almost exactly the same for me to think they're fake accounts. I haven't really seen the same on facebook at all, to the point where I'm skeptical that facebook would be a sensible platform at all for astroturfing politics. Most of the nonsense I see on facebook is from clickbait farms. I'm open to the idea that I've just missed the facebook side though.

> Do you think Russia pays people to post inflammatory content on twitter, or to advocate for the Russian perspective like RT do?

People generally are far behind on what's public knowledge about the Russian internet propaganda efforts. Yes, that's exactly what they've been known to be doing, including interviews with former participants.

> The agency has employed fake accountsregistered on major social networks,[2]discussion boards, online newspaper sites, and video hosting services to promote the Kremlin's interests in domestic and foreign policy including Ukraine and the Middle Eastas well as attempting to influence the 2016 United States presidential election.

As of last known count, they had a $15million/year budget. But they've been reported to have grown significantly since the success of the US election.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

my implication is that these agents do the latter rather than the former. I'm suggesting that you can divide the "twitter trolls" set into two - 4chan users who post inflammatory content, and Russian agents who aim to help bring politics that are of interest to the Russian government into the mainstream.

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