Russian journalist Lyudmila Savchuk went undercover to take a job working for the Kremlin’s internet troll shop for 2 months which was used to push false or exaggerated anti-Clinton stories during last years election, as well as attack other candidates in the Ukraine and in the west.
Savchuk: They get work specifications. There are several main topics, Ukraine, USA and the EU. In general all main topics that are on the agenda and also Russian opposition figures are regularly insulted and discredited on the internet.
They work everywhere across social networks. Twitter, all the big networks. They leave comments on media websites in many language, English, German, Ukrainian.
She reveals that she was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement and that the troll work took place in several languages including english and on different platforms. Many of these troll accounts were specifically push pro-Trump and anti-Clinton stories and memes while being paid by the Kremlin and did so while specifically targeting key swing states during the election.
It’s not just about the hacking, it’s how the Kremlin used, distorted and promulgated the information they stole to change the election outcome.
From the Business Insider.
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.
In his research from St. Petersburg, Chen discovered that Russian internet trolls — paid by the Kremlin to spread false information on the internet — have been behind a number of "highly coordinated campaigns" to deceive the American public.
It's a brand of information warfare, known as "dezinformatsiya," that has been used by the Russians since at least the Cold War. The disinformation campaigns are only one "active measure" tool used by Russian intelligence to "sow discord among," and within, allies perceived hostile to Russia.
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He continued (emphasis added):
"It is designed, as retired KGB General Oleg Kalugin once defined it, 'to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.' The most common subcategory of active measures is dezinformatsiya, or disinformation: feverish, if believable lies cooked up by Moscow Centre and planted in friendly media outlets to make democratic nations look sinister."
It is not surprising, then, that the Kremlin would pay internet trolls to pose as Trump supporters and build him up online. In fact, that would be the easy part.
Yesterday Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence committee specifically stated that these trolls were used to impact the election in exactly the key swing states that pushed Trump over the top.
The Kremlin paid an army of more than 1,000 people to create fake anti-Hillary Clinton news stories targeting key swing states, the leading Democrat on the committee looking into alleged Russian interference in the US election has said.
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Mr Warner said: “We know about the hacking, and selective leaks, but what really concerns me as a former tech guy is at least some reports – and we’ve got to get to the bottom of this – that there were upwards of a thousand internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas.
“It’s been reported to me, and we’ve got to find this out, whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, ‘Clinton is sick’, or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.
“An outside foreign adversary effectively sought to hi-jack the most critical democratic process, the election of a President, and in that process, decided to favour one candidate over another.”
Fake news was being generated by the trolls and micro targeted to the specific states that Trump needed to win. And as we’ve seen that fake news had a huge impact, including the claim that Hillary Clinton was part of a “child sex traffic ring” which even now some of those who pushed those stories refuse to admit that they were all lies.
Particularly when one of the key people repeating this fake news, is the candidate for President that you happen to favor.
Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and counterterrorism instructor at West Point, explained Thursday that Trump as a presidential candidate helped Russia take active measures to interfere with the election, whether he realized it or not.
“Part of the reason active measures have worked in this election is because the commander-in-chief has used active measures at times against his opponents,” Watts testified.
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He testified that Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chairman, promoted a bogus story Aug. 14 about a terrorist attack on a NATO base in Turkey, which originated on the Russian propaganda websites RT and Sputnik.
Trump then cited a Sputnik article Oct. 11 about Benghazi that later disappeared from the internet, and Watts pointed out that the president denies the conclusions of U.S. intelligence about Russian election interference.
Watts also testified that Trump claimed repeatedly that the election could be rigged, which he said was the No. 1 theme pushed by RT, Sputnik and other Russian propaganda outlets.
“He’s made claims of voter fraud, that President Obama’s not a citizen and, you know, Congressman (Ted) Cruz is not a citizen,” Watts said. “Part of the reason active measures works, and it does today in terms of Trump Tower being ‘wiretapped,’ is because they parrot the same lines.”
So if Trump took Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan because of a coordinated and collaborative effort between his campaign and the Kremlin’s troll army which systematically deceived the American electorate — this election was stolen. A fraud was perpetrated, using racketeering and conspiracy.
The only question remaining is how much Trump and his people were aware that they were being fed false propaganda by the Kremlin, we already know that they willfully and eagerly used that information.
Thursday, Mar 30, 2017 · 9:26:51 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Today testifying before the Senate Gen. Keith Alexander argued that Kremlin Trolls used “Bernie Bros” to spread their disinformation.
emocratic committee co-chair Sen. Mark Warner (VA) asked the panel if they had any doubt that Russia had attempted to interfere in some aspects of the 2016 election. Alexander said not only did he have no doubt, he could get very specific.
“Senator, I think what they were trying to do was drive a wedge within the Democratic Party between the Clinton group and the Sanders group,” said Alexander. “And then in our nation between Republicans and Democrats.”
Supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) reported earlier this month that during the 2016 election, their social media feeds and pro-Sanders Facebook groups were inundated with what they now believe were Russian bots spewing anti-Hillary memes including fake news stories about Clinton using a body doubleand murdering her ideological opponents. Over time the anti-Clinton online faction became known by the nickname “Bernie Bros.”
And witness Clint Watts argued we need to “follow the trail of dead Russians” to get to the truth as the Kremlin attempts to close up all their leaks.
The virtual assault, Watts said, came from a “disproportionate number of fake news outlets” in Eastern Europe, “conspiratorial web sites that are run from there that are English-speaking editors that are pro-Russian. Trained in Russia sometimes. How are they funded? That would be one component.”
“My hypothesis, working in the intelligence field,” he continued, “is that there is some sort of Russian intel asset that is funding them in one way or another through some sort of scheme.”
“The other part that I think we should be looking at is: Follow the trail of dead Russians,” Watts said. “There’s been more dead Russians in the past three months that are tied to this investigation who have assets in banks all over the world. They are dropping dead, even in western countries. We have seen arrests in I believe it’s Spain and different computer security companies that are based in Russia, which provide services to the United States. These are all huge openings to understand how they are funded by the Russian government. I don’t have the capability to do that from where I sit, but I think that’s a huge angle.”
