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posted by mrcoolbp on Monday April 06 2015, @01:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the пропаганда-сегодня dept.

Shaun Walker writes at The Guardian that that more and more posts and commentaries on the internet are generated by professional trolls in Russia who receive a salary for perpetuating a pro-Kremlin dialogue online. Many emanate from Russia's most famous "troll factory," the Internet Research center, an unassuming building on St. Petersburg's Savushkina Street, which runs on a 24-hour cycle with hundreds of people working there in grinding, 12-hour shifts in exchange for 40,000 rubles ($700) a month.

According to Walker the work environment is humorless and draconian, with fines for being a few minutes late or not reaching the required number of posts each day. Trolls worked in rooms of about 20 people, each controlled by three editors, who would check posts and impose fines if they found the words had been cut and pasted, or were ideologically deviant. "There are production quotas, and for meeting your quota you get 45,000," says Marat Burkhard, who spent two months working at the troll factory. "The quota is 135 comments per 12-hour shift." Burkhart says that every city and village in Russia has its own municipal website with its own comments forum and the task of workers at the troll factory is to comment on each site. Burkhard explains how the professional trolls work in teams of three:

One of us would be the "villain," the person who disagrees with the forum and criticizes the authorities, in order to bring a feeling of authenticity to what we're doing. The other two enter into a debate with him -- "No, you're not right; everything here is totally correct." One of them should provide some kind of graphic or image that fits in the context, and the other has to post a link to some content that supports his argument. You see? Villain, picture, link.

We covered a similar story from BBC in March.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday April 06 2015, @02:08AM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Monday April 06 2015, @02:08AM (#166822) Homepage

    I would consider the so-called "Professional Trolls" named in the article "Disinformation agents" akin to Hasbara [hasbara.com] and similar efforts [washingtonsblog.com] from American and British agencies, among others.

    One of the mandates of the Professional Troll is to piss people off, optionally with enough truth to be credible. Disinformation agents are out to sway public opinion in the least inflammatory manner possible so that readers are more readily accepting of their message.

     

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @05:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @05:46AM (#166855)
    Pissing people off and trolling can be part of a disinformation campaign.

    Not everyone who posts a valid point/opinion (that you don't want spread) is good at arguing or spotting logical fallacies and countering them, or even just willing to keep arguing, etc.

    So someone could just attack the poster to discourage or discredit them or to hijack the topic (consider job done when the whole thread goes off topic, especially if it degenerates into a flame/troll fest, even better if the site/page/etc becomes so full of shit that many the real people leave permanently).
  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @07:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @07:08AM (#166871)

    My god! Does that explain Lush Dimbulb and Faux News?