The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg
1–10 of 97 posts
Re: The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg
#2The article is really good, but this title is extremely vague.
Re: The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg
#3Poorly titled and therefore hard to share on Hacker News, but lengthy and worth reading investigative reporting into a bizarre 'Internet Research Agency' that mainly produces pro-Putin propaganda, in both English and Russian.
I'm surprised, frankly, that they don't have better English-language proficiency.
Re: The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg
#4Poorly titled and therefore hard to share on Hacker News, but lengthy and worth reading investigative reporting into a bizarre 'Internet Research Agency' that mainly produces pro-Putin propaganda, in both English and Russian. I'm surprised, frankly, that they don't have better English-language proficiency.
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).
Re: The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg
#5The article is really good, but this title is extremely vague.
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.
Re: The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg
#6> The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.
Re: The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg
#7I am sure this is not only happening in Russia.
Re: The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg
#8If you don't feel like reading it, this is an amusing tale of one arm of the pro-Kremlin propaganda machine. The kicker is at the end when Russian propaganda sources tried to make it seem as if the reporter were recruiting Nazis for a complicated CIA scheme.
Re: The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg
#9> ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one YouTube video; in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion.
This linked to the wrong video, the actual link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2J6RvajSaA
Edit: He fixed it.
Re: The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg
#10Expect a follow-up article in the Washington Post about a covert Chinese internet propaganda organization which successfully planted a story in the New York Times attributing a series of alleged online hoaxes to a Russian organization. The hoaxes seemed real enough - there were youtube videos and twitter accounts and websites - but in reality there was no evidence that the hoaxes had ever actually happened.