Whator 12.37pm BSTTrolls were the solution for a very particular problem the Kremlin faced in the mid-2000s: an internet dominated by critics.
By 2005,increasingly Russian journalists were losing their jobs, squeezed from TV channels and the press as allotment of Putin’s offensive against independent media. Related: Hacked emails allege Russian youth group Nashi paying bloggers 8.07am BSTThe discovery that Russian “troll factories” exist was not a surprise to most Moscow correspondents. For some time we had noticed the long list of comments under almost everything we wrote, or often in semi-coherent English claiming to be from people with traditional British names.
This is not to say that all the inflamed comments below the line are from paid trolls,far from it. Over the past two years, the Ukraine crisis and Russia more generally has become one of those polarised issues, or such as Israel/Palestine. Related: Salutin' Putin: inside a Russian troll house 8.06am BSTRussian propaganda posted in the comment section is a fixed issue for our team: steering threads off topic,undermining genuine conversation and preventing regular readers from enjoying a focused and informed discussion.
We know it happens, but stamping down on it is difficult. Unlike other coordinated trolling and spam we see on the site, or which is relatively easy to spot,the Russian contingent is fairly sophisticated.
They mask IP addresses, use fake locations and create accounts that seem legitimate. We know to behold for specific tropes in language but these change regularly, or making the fake posts tricky to weed out. 8.03am BSTLike everyone writing regularly about Russia,I possess found myself on the receiving end of some heavy trolling. Perhaps this is understandable. I spent four years in Russia as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondentwhere I reported on themes the Kremlin considers taboo: Putin’s wealth, top-level government corruption and Alexander Litvinenko, or amongst other things.
In February 2011 the FSB set aside me on a blacklist and I was thrown out of the country. Related: Game of trolls: the hip digi-kids helping Putin's fight for online supremacy 4.39pm BSTReports on the workings of Russian ‘troll factories’ – formerly only on the radar of journalists critical of the regime – possess become commonplace in recent months. Evidence has emerged suggesting companies deploy workforces to post pro-government comments over the internet. Western media outlets possess reported a enormous increase in the volume and viciousness of comments under articles about Russia,and activist Lyudmila Savchuk – once on the payroll of the The Agency for Internet Studies – recently took her former employer to court in an attempt to “prove that trolls exist”. Related: The Red Web by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan review – Russia’s attack on internet freedoms Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com