Maybe you've experienced it firsthand. As the presidential campaign heats up, largely from the self- immolation of neo- fascist and Vladimir Putin useful idiot Donald "Rump" Trump, progressive blogs have been reporting an upsurge in Russian trolls/ bots infesting their sites. A few examples --
AmericaBlog yesterday: "Sorry, but we’ve had a lot of Russian trolls, from Russian troll farms, in the blog comments today..."
Wonkette yesterday:
But we were at least treated to our very own Russian Troll, “Mixa Klimment,” though we aren’t sure whether this was actually one of those paid Rooshian trolls who masquerade as American conservatives — for one thing, Mixa’s IP address actually placed him in the Russian Federation, and he also posted links to a number of YouTube videos in Russian. Our impression was that paid dezinformatsiya experts make at least a token effort to hide their tracks, but who knows? Hell, maybe “Mixa Klimment” is an American admirer of Putin and Trump who spoofed a Russian IP address? Or simply not very good at the trolling? Who/whatever he is, “Mixa Klimment” is a prolific spammer, posting the same set of comments all over the web — which made us feel a little less special, honestly...And so on. It goes beyond comment section trolling. For example, going on YouTube or Google to find an anti- Trump ad will get you a Volga boatload of pro- Trump, pro- Putin clips and ads instead. Same with Twitter and other social media. In fact, without those Rooskies (and Rump's white nationalist mouth breathers) helping him, he'd have very little social media presence at all we'd bet. If only these people were as talented in creating a free and open society...
This brings up a story first reported in the New York Times Magazine back in June 2015. Business Insider picks up the thread of the Russian "Trolling for Trump" phenomenon:
Russia's troll factories were, at one point, likely being paid by the Kremlin to spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media.
That is what freelance journalist Adrian Chen, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, discovered as he was researching Russia's "army of well-paid trolls" for an explosive New York Times Magazine exposé published in June 2015.
"A very interesting thing happened," Chen told Longform's Max Linsky in a podcast in December.
"I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what's going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff," he said.
Linsky then asked Chen who he thought "was paying for that."
"I don't know," Chen replied. "I feel like it's some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump to undermine the US or something. Like false-flag kind of thing. You know, that's how I started thinking about all this stuff after being in Russia."The entire piece is worth a read, of course. The Clinton/ Kaine campaign needs to keep hammering away like this, to hell with the Russian "Trolls for Trump." They're transparent, rather lame and eager for you to engage. Don't. Just see them for what they are and move on.
(Image: "Sharrup you mouth!" No goodnik Russian trolls - visual approximation.)
