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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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