A whiff of spring this early March day. I long for rich, loamy dirt and a bag of heritage seeds. But forget corn, beans or tomato crops. Today, I am going to plant information in my beautiful readers’ heads about troll farms.
WHAT ARE THEY?
A Troll is internet slang for a person who sows discord on the internet.
According to the Collins Dictionary, Troll Farms are organizations “whose employees or members attempt to create conflict and disruption in an online community by posting deliberately inflammatory or provocative comments.”
USA Today defines them as “an organized operation of many users who may work together…to generate online traffic aimed at affecting public opinion and to spread misinformation and disinformation.”
Friends, there is no Pax Technica. We are currently, and have been for quite a while, deep into the world of Info Wars. No nukes, no bullets. But make no mistake, thousands of “soldiers” crammed into warehouse “factories” are waging aggressive campaigns to manipulate policies and actions of governments and individuals.
In 2013, the Russian Internet Research Agency, formed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch closely tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, had a monthly budget of one million dollars. According to CNN, one of its departments, the “Department of Provocations,” has been tasked with creating fake news to achieve its goals of disruption. According to Adrian Chen for the New Yorker, “The real effect (of the trolling phenomenom)…is not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.”
HOW DOES THIS WORK?
Take the Keystone Pipeline protests. Russia is a one-trick pony oil economy at the moment. Russia has a lot of power over Europe based on their ability to supply energy. Keystone diminishes their European influence. Russian trolls swamped the social media sites in support of the protesters. Chen reports, “One troll recalls…the point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate.”
Another example: when Chen was investigating the Internet Research Agency, he reported, “One of the troll’s favorite topics to promote was the violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting of Michael Brown.” These already charged issues, badly in need of clear, critical thinking, are ramped up into frenzied, polarizing social media events, creating severe, sometimes violent, paralyzing division.
USA Today reports, “The overall goal of the troll farm is to create divisive wedges, pitting Americans against each other…the goal is to undermine democracy…you want America to look unstable and Americans not to trust each other.”
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have been inundated with fake identities and “news stories” created by trolls working around the clock. Mya Kosoff reports for Vanity Fair, “The St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency—the same Kremlin-linked troll farm that placed thousands of ads on Facebook—also had boots on the ground. Russian trolls from the “American Department” of the Internet Research Agency duped American activists into taking real action via protests and self-defense trainings, reported BuzzFeed News in what would seem to be a further attempt to exploit racial grievances.”
Such are the times we live in, but while the Info Wars rage, heroes do emerge. One of my favorites is a single Russian mother I read about in Der Speigel Online, a German news agency.
Lyudmila Savchuk, a Russian journalist, “joined forces with other activists in a group called InfoPeace. A popular opponent of Putin, Boris Nemzov, had been assassinated. The troll factory was disseminating false “information” over Russian social media sites that someone from Nemzov’s own party was responsible, infuriating Nemzov’s followers.”
Lyudmila “deliberately infiltrated (a troll factory in St Petersberg) to expose the business of paying people to post pro-Kremlin online comments.” She wanted to expose who is behind the troll factories and found that the workers, mostly young people, were paid under the table with cash.
“They don’t pay any taxes or make any pension contributions. It is good money: 50,000 rubles a month ($985),” she said, “but nobody knows exactly where the money comes from. As a concerned citizen, what upsets me is that there is no money in Russia for important social projects right now, but there is for this nonsense, for hundreds of trolls.”
There are troll factories in Russia, China, Iran, N. Korea and all the places you would expect. We have our own departments on the offensive regarding global social media, as do most governments these days. It’s a tool of war, Info War. It’s just a new version of agit-prop, high-tech propaganda. We, the consumers of information, need to carefully evaluate what we receive, especially until the integrity of the social media platforms we use are improved.
Meanwhile, plant good deeds, sow good thoughts, pull out the weeds and have a good harvest.
Vamos a ver!
Paula LaBrot is a 30-year resident of Topanga, a futurist with a special interest in the uncharted waters of cyberspace. plabrot@messengermountainnews.com.
