"Hunting for paid Russian trolls in the Washington Post comments section"/why Politic

litwin · Aug 29, 2014

"Hunting for paid Russian trolls in the Washington Post comments section"/why Political Forum doest do it?

its clear for everyone here, that we have at least 3 paid Russian trolls, so my question , should PF does something with this or ?

Since April, Russia has spent thousands of dollars amassing a troll army to torment American social networking and news sites, per a pair of stories that ran on Buzzfeed this week.

The trolls are, allegedly, legion. Theyre foul-mouthed and irritable. Theyre funded by an online marketing firm with very distant ties to the Kremlin. And they are, according to Buzzfeed, operating in the Posts comment section as well as the New York Times, CNNs and the Huffington Posts.

The Post hasnt, for the record, been able to conclusively verify Buzzfeeds reporting or review the original documents from an anonymous hacker collective that reporter Max Seddon cited in his story. Nevertheless, we couldnt let these simultaneously menacing and hilarious allegations of overseas trolling stand! And so, armed with some healthy skepticism and the descriptions of the trolls behavior in Seddons piece, I along with the Posts commenting overlords, Julia Carpenter and Beth Butler set off to hunt some trolls.

The Russian trolls, per Buzzfeed, generally share a couple of telltale characteristics. They are, it should go without saying, (a) Russian and (b) trolls, a.k.a. commenters who engage in off-topic provocation for no apparent reason besides giving moderators like Beth and Julia headaches. Their English tends to be poor, with syntactical and grammatical errors characteristic of native Russian speakers. And they always engage on one of a set list of topics, which include predictably Ukraine, President Obama and LGBT rights.

Sure enough, we found a few commenters who seemed to fit the bill. Like this user, commenting on an article about Obamas dismissal of Russian territorial claims:

Halloo, egghead! Lets go! Oink-oink-oink-oink-oink hahaha-haha-ha..))))))))))) [He then launches into an anti-American screed in Russian.]

Or another commenter, who twice left the same response to an article about Ukraine:

But we are millions here, all Russian, we do not like to kiss *** of the western superiors of Ukrainian candy president. We want to be part of mother impire. What about us?

A third suspicious user was banned from the Posts forums after making multiple comments in Russian and then posting a Social Security number, in violation of Post policies.

By and large, however, these trolls werent any trollier than some of the other more disruptive denizens of the Posts comments section, most of whom provide their services we assume for free. In fact, while a few of the apparent trolls had comments deleted for violating Post policies, the group as a whole never stood out from the other commenters the Post flags daily. ( which, come to think of it, may say something profound about the caliber of online discourse.)

We didnt immediately pluck them out from the crowd as mastermind spies, is how Julia put it.

This is all anecdotal, of course, but it supports observations that have been made about similar international trolling efforts before. It certainly merits comparison to the U.S. State Departments Digital Outreach Team, which dedicates itself largely to trolling jihadists in Arabic, Punjabi, Somali and Urdu-language forums, as well as on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

So far, reviews of that program have been pretty mediocre: a 2012 study concluded that the teams efforts did very little to change the tone of anti-American conversations. In fact, on the whole, users were vastly more likely to ridicule or refute the American trolls than to actually converse with them. It would seem the Posts Russian trolls have met much the same fate.

The Obama administration should encourage itself to keep its nose away from Russian-Ukrainian relations, wrote one. One minute later, another user had already countered.

Not going to happen, buddy.
Click to expand...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...olls-in-the-washington-post-comments-section/

litwin · Aug 29, 2014

http://www.novayagazeta.ru/politics/59889.html
the great article

troll house

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"Hunting for paid Russian trolls in the Washington Post comments section"/why Politic

litwin Well-Known Member

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"Hunting for paid Russian trolls in the Washington Post comments section"/why Politic

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