The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg

I'm not sure if you'd agree with it or not, but I'd want to emphasize something: this behavior is not limited to foreign governments that have antithetical interests to the USA. Even publicly, the CIA recognizes that it has teams of employees working on social media to push people (particularly in the Middle East) to support positions more consistent with American interests.

And it'd surely be pretty damn profitable in the USA domestically to offer a service where a bunch of trolls would push your product, service, or candidate on the Internet.

(This comment may or may not be brought to you by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.)

> I'm surprised, frankly, that they don't have better English-language proficiency.

People with high English proficiency are probably employed at better-paying gigs.

> that mainly produces pro-Putin propaganda, in both English and Russian.

And also seems to be testing disinformation campaigns in the US, such as spreading panic about (fake) disasters.

Russians have a very low English level by european standards, and people proficient in English cost more. Main profit model of this establishments was always cutting costs while charging more — especially when the person you're charging is a government official (whom you know very closely), who is hiring your company to get some of this budget in his pocket in the first place. So, the quality is not at all the priority, and when it is, the % of the money that gets stolen is still enormous (Sochi).

I was born and raised in Ukraine till I turned 14. Still have most of my family there and they visit regularly. They were present during most of the revolution and I can confirm nothing but love and pride to be Ukrainian. All that talk about Ukrainian nazi is garbage. Yes, we aren't perfect and we may have difficulties bringing order but it was all done with good intentions at heart. Most recent revolutions, including the Orange revolution, are some of the most peaceful times in Ukraine. People are truly united, crime rates drop dramatically, people make food and bring it to feed others for free. Both of my grandparents attended all of these events. I've never been more proud, I hope peace and order can be restored without Russia's involvement.

The rest of the world has also gotten much better at propaganda. Listing to older broadcasts can almost seem laughable in comparison.

EX: Reefer madness vs. modern anti-smoking campaigns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reefer_Madness http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/24/cdc-smo...

I find it deeply concerning how easily a modern state can alter how its population thinks. Outright lies are a lot easier to counter than selective truths.

I dunno about sophisticated. The presumably failed experiment with the #ColombianChemicals hoax was almost cute in its lack of direction or success[1]. It sounds like the sort of hoax Anonymous - teenagers without leadership or direction or payment - would successfully have pulled off. And the ironic thing is that even if they had the wherewithal to actually convince people, the rumour would barely have moved the needle compared with the hornets nests stirred up on a daily basis by rumours (true and false) spread by the mainstream Western press (much of which is sufficiently unprofitable for the price of influence to be affordable, incidentally[2])

If Russian propagandists are generally active in the Western media, it's difficult to view them as particularly effective: you'd have found more Western contemporaries willing to sympathise with Stalin than Putin, even during the McCarthy era, and Obama's approval ratings aren't doing too badly. I can't judge their effectiveness in Russian media, but I doubt that a particularly large proportion of the promoters of nationalism and bigotry are on Putin's payroll.... its not like their ilk is exactly nonexistent in the West.

Goebbels' message might have been more top-down and less subtle than Russia's social media spamming, but it did convince a reasonably well educated and well-to-do population that there was absolutely nothing wrong with rounding up all the Jews to deport, and convince the rest of Europe there was nothing to be particularly concerned about. That takes a little more effort than persuading Russians the West doesn't like them very much.

[1]to the extent that false explosion reports on September 11th can be considered cute

[2]Four mainstream British newspapers actually are owned by a wealthy Russian, though he's far too involved with Russian opposition parties to be inclined towards toning down their pretty standard critical editorial line on Russian policy

It has exceeded the level of the Soviet Regime during its later years because it's quite effective. Soviet Regime was falling apart so in the last few years of it everybody paid lip service to propaganda, but nobody really believed it because it was quite obvious that the system was falling apart. This is not really the case now in Russia. Yet

The astonishing thing about this propaganda machine is not that it is technically proficient. It is not in any way; it is technically crude. It's just a fairly direct political control by state of the TV and papers, and for on-line, just hiring people to spread propaganda on forums.

What is astonishing is its psychological effectiveness. It seems to encompass all levels of Russian society, especially the poorer people who are cut off from anything but the state TV, but also the middle classes. And the elite is wise to shut up and pretend to believe though they surely know what goes on. The conformity to social norms is so important: if you don't condemn the Kiev Nazis, you are a fascist yourself. Any disagreement will make even friends and family members turn against you, regardless of how good evidence you have for what you say.

I know Russians who live abroad and/or are net-connected and understand what goes on, but they are simply staying quiet, because they don't want to loose contact to their relatives and long-time friends. In a way, it's an example of "The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil."

My dad claims that the level of brainwashing in USA far far exceeds that of the WWII Germany he says.

Of course statements like that evoke Godwin's law and a hard to swallow. However, my dad grew up in USA and trained troops on the use of artillery equipment during the Vietnam war. He's been around the block and has seen firsthand the US propaganda in multiple countries.

If you think about the insidiousness of troll-style, FUD propaganda, it's way way more psychologically insidious than the overt US propaganda. You can't cut off access to facts and appear "fair"--instead you make people question the truth.

USA just raised a whole young generation that's a socially-backwards by a generation. Homophobic, racist, blame-the-russia feelings are rampant.

During the early days of the Ukranian conflict, I was surprised to hear a close relative in USA tell me how she has seen videos on Youtube of "blacks from Africa" killing innocent US youths in Nigeria.

This shit is real.

Well they didn't really need propaganda in Russia. They had communism. Believe it or not some people actually believed that Communism is better than capitalism, and arguably at one time capitalism kind of sucked.

Think about that: we know Adrian Chen did not in fact go to Russia to make common cause with neo-Nazi groups, so the most likely interpretation of those photos is: some or all of that neo-Nazi group is on the payroll of Russian propaganda groups.

Some PR strategies are similar. A company hold an annual conference several weeks ago. The company was under represented in the HN user base. What was eye opening was that many new users joined HN in a short timeframe to write very pro-company comments - it looked like an concerted effort to polish the company reputation. Another example is related to a recent video game release. The marketing was in a gray area almost a fraud and the launch was like a debacle, though the PR managed to get away with it with a black eye.

We added part of the article's subtitle to make it more informative. We're open to suggestions for a better title.

Indeed. I assumed it would be about CIA.

The subtitle is much more descriptive:

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

Wikipedia says that's around the average Russian wage.

The question for me is how to counteract this kind of trolling. If someone is saying something stupid, it's easy as an individual to ignore it ignoring the time wasted reading it, but it's genuinely deadly for communities.

I think some kind of web of trust, except this time for comments or social media artifacts, is probably the way to go.

Be careful. The notion that opinions we don't like are generated by organized trolling campaigns is toxic, and insidiously serves the objectives of the trolls.

If you feel like comments on a thread are coming from an organized trolling/shilling campaign, try to collect some evidence for it and then notify hn@ycombinator.com --- that's what they've asked you to do.

But don't start a conversation on the thread itself about how specific commenters, or even a particular style of comment, are being made in bad faith. It's the easiest criticism in the world for a troll to deflect: just start an argument that you're commenting in good faith and being persecuted for unpopular opinions. 100 comments later, the thread will seem to casual readers like nothing but litigation over who the commenters are. Mission accomplished.

> recently on HN, where trolls derailed the conversation so badly

We found no evidence of trolling (in the sense of subversive shilling) in that thread. As far as I can tell, one commenter was who he said he was—an individual who felt passionately—and other commenters accused him because they didn't like what he said. His passion didn't help his cause, but he didn't deserve that.

Groundless accusations of astroturfing and shillage are not allowed on Hacker News. If the only evidence one has is "these comments seem so wrong to me", that's groundless. Accusations based merely on the strength of one's own opinions cost this community considerable health points, and we're not going to let it become a thing. If it gets worse, we'll make a top post about this, explicitly ban it, and add a rule about it to the guidelines. In the meantime, please flag such comments.

HN has users with many divergent views. The community spreads across countries where perspectives and politics are different from one's own [1]. It's common for X to seem obvious to one user while ~X seems obvious to another. Occam has no trouble accounting for most of what people call trolling, astroturfing, and shilling in controversial threads.

When any of you have concerns about astroturfing, you're welcome to send them to hn@ycombinator.com. We'll take them seriously. We'll also be careful and stick to what we can find evidence for.

1. This cross-cultural aspect of HN is a big deal. We see it all the time; I think it's underappreciated.

You are certain that trolls derailed the conversation?

It could just as well be one person stating his opinions. His opinions are controversal, and therefore they generate lots of responses (derailing) and he is downvoted because they go against what most people here believe. Doesn't quite seem like an army of professional "trolls" manipulating the discussion (If he is a troll, he would probably have presented his statements more effectively or subtly. The way he did almost guaranteed being downvoted).

Those "troll groups" are surely not a good thing, and you can never be certain this person wasn't one of them, but I also wouldn't label everyone I don't agree with a troll, just because they dare to write down their opinion, and my point of view is the one of the majority.

The internet has always been full of delusional people with extreme opinions untroubled by logic or argument.

I wouldn't worry too much - good moderation systems were built to handle these from the start. The places where paid trolls are likely to be most effective are also the places where you see the largest quantity of ridiculous posts from ordinary people. I'm thinking newspaper comment sections here, but Twitter might count too.

Whether someone is posting nonsense because they're paid or just because they can't sleep (https://xkcd.com/386/) the response to it is the same: robust forum software combined with people who point out their fallacies.

Here is a better example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yeahyeah

At the time this was the top comment and completely derailed the conversation. Pretty sure that wasn't a Russian agency, take a guess which one it was.

EDIT: amazing, I provide the community a crystal clear example of astroturfing and get down voted.

Got any references or links?

Can we expect another follow up from Huffington Post that it was the NK propaganda agency which successfully planted the story about the Chinese in the Washington Post?

And we can continue this story until it comes back that it all started with the NSA.

... Until we learn that it is really an alien civilization that wants our natural resources trying to get us all to kill each other so they don't have to fight us?

I kid I kid, but seriously...