Putin's Internet Propaganda War Is Much Bigger And Weirder Than You Think, Now Extending Into The States

from the ministry-of-truth dept

We've been writing lately about how Putin and Russia have shifted their internet propaganda forces into overdrive, employing multiple factories operated by a company named Internet Research, filling the internet with Putin-friendly drivel twenty-four-hours a day. The insight into these efforts has become more and more interesting as whistleblowers have started exposing (and most recently suing over) them the last six months. Contrary to similar efforts in other countries (U.S. included), there's absolutely no subtlety on display here, and the scale is unlike anything the internet has ever seen.

Interestingly, many of the comments to my last piece made some really compelling points regarding what Putin is up to. Here's a small smattering:

"Karl Bode, author of this very article, has most likely unwittingly fallen for an ukrainian-made honey-pot propaganda trap."

"I cant help see this article as another stone in the western propaganda campaign against Putin the last few months, and not really about social media propaganda."

"The story of that Russian propaganda factory that caught Karl Bode's attention (assuming the story is even true and is not itself a counter-propaganda gig similar to 'WMD') seems very amateurish in comparison to the depth and sophistication to the US military's sock-puppetry programs."

"By writing this horse shit, all Techdirt has done is shown that it's writers are easily manipulated. I expect more pro-US, anti-Russia propaganda from them in the future."

Anybody who knows me remotely would find accusations that I'm "pro-US" pretty damn funny given how I've spent most of my career criticizing US government policies. Are these comments ingenious satire? Russian propagandists? Domestic garden-variety home-grown tin-foil hatters? The benefit of propaganda is you just can't tell. But science pretty consistently shows that comments can pretty easily impact discourse, even if what's being posted is relatively unhinged from reality. So to be clear, it's true: I'm a total lackey for western imperialists; a pawn of the NSA and CIA, and as most people know, I make a killing freelancing as a propagandist for AT&T corporation.

Moving on. While there's no doubt the United States has employed similar tactics for years (profitable wars and shitty foreign policy don't sell themselves, you know), that doesn't make the sheer scale of Putin's troll army any less impressive...or real.

The New York Times Magazine has an outstanding exploration of Putin's propaganda efforts and Russia's Internet Research Agency, connecting a series of incredibly well-constructed hoaxes using fake YouTube videos, fake Wikipedia entries, and thousands of Twitter accounts -- many of which were designed to pollute the global discourse pool here in the States. Author Adrian Chen headed to St. Petersburg to track down and talk to whistleblower Lyudmila Savchuk, who goes into greater detail than ever before about the program. Again, there's propaganda, and then there's what Putin's up to, which is a factory-grade internet assault on reality injected with steroids and caffeine:

"As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian."

These efforts have become so massive, local journalists claim they have, at least for now, managed to subvert the historical anti-authoritarian and free speech benefits of the internet:

"All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition. “The myth that the Internet is controlled by the opposition is very, very old,” says Leonid Volkov, a liberal politician and campaign manager to Alexei Navalny. “It’s not true since at least three years.” Part of this is simple demographics: The Internet audience has expanded from its early adopters, who were more likely to be well-educated liberal intelligentsia, to the whole of Russia, which overwhelmingly supports Putin. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction."

The piece repeats previous claims that Russia's industrial-grade propaganda apparatus has fixed its gaze upon the United States, and while so far some of these efforts on places like Facebook are so ham-fisted as to be comical, some of them are absolutely astounding in their scope and architecture. Like the Facebook group of Russian trolls that encourage followers to visit an art exhibit named "Material Evidence" hosted in Chelsea, New York City. The effort, funded by anonymous overseas donors, claims to show the "other side" of the Ukranian conflict and Syrian civil war not shown by Western media:

"Then there were the pictures from the Ukrainian revolution, which focused almost exclusively on the Right Sector, a small group of violent, right-wing, anti-Russian protesters with a fondness for black balaclavas. Russian authorities have seized upon Right Sector to paint the entire revolution, backed by a huge swath of Ukrainian society, as orchestrated by neo-fascist thugs. The show’s decision to juxtapose the rebellions in Syria and Ukraine was never clearly explained, perhaps because the only connection possible was that both targeted leaders supported by Russia. On the floor in front of many of the photos sat the actual items that appeared in them, displayed under glass cases. How, exactly, did organizers procure the very same battered motorcycle helmet that a Ukrainian protester wore in a photo while brawling with riot police? Who had fronted the money to purchase a mangled white van, supposedly used by Syrian rebels in a botched suicide bombing, and transport it to New York City?

Let that sink in for a second. Armies of fake U.S. Facebook accounts, sending followers to an entirely fake art exhibit in New York, promoted by an army of fake and hijacked Twitter accounts -- all of it tied to Russia's Internet Research Agency. At one point in his documentation efforts, Chen makes contact and meets up with a supposed Internet Research Agency employee and her brother, only to later discover the entire meeting is a staged photo op, later used by "news organizations" tied to Internet Research to discredit Chen as a neo nazi supporter. That story soon ballooned into a series of other Russian news stories accusing Chen of being BFFs with the NSA, CIA, and neo nazis, accompanied with snazzy videos to "prove" it.

So again, yes, most countries engage in propaganda. That's not really being disputed. Most Americans at this point are at least marginally aware of the propaganda used to sell recent wars conducted by the United States -- and the complicit behavior of the media in these efforts to this day stinks up the hallowed halls of most "respected" American news outlets (the same outlets that love to lecture bloggers on what news really is). But what Putin is up to is a propaganda war against the entire internet, and it makes dystopian visions by the likes of Orwell and Terry Gilliam look like Hardy Boy mysteries. Of course none of that matters because I'm clearly a Western imperialist puppy murderer, and this article was funded by the CIA, as commenters below will be sure to illustrate.

Filed Under: adrian chen, comments, propaganda, russia, social media, trolls, vladimir putin
Companies: internet research agency

Reddit, Trolling, Doxxing, Free Speech & Anonymity: Whoo Boy, Is This Stuff Complicated

from the keeping-up dept

In case you haven't been following last week's big controversy on Reddit, there are a number of debates going on about a variety of topics, concerning free speech, trolling, anonymity and more. The very short version is as follows: there had been some (quite reasonable and understandable) concern about the subreddit /r/CreepShots in which people (almost all of whom are likely to be guys) were posting surreptitiously shot photos of others, usually women, usually focused on sexually objectifying the subjects of the shot. The subreddit was one of a number of similarly disturbing subreddits that focus on objectifying women -- often very young women. Reddit tends to take a mostly hands off approach to this kind of thing, letting the community do what the community does. In extreme cases where the terms of service have been violated (and laws have been broken) stuff gets shut down -- but for the most part, Reddit lets the community police itself. Some Redditors figured out that the best way to deal with information they don't like is with more information and they started exposing information about the moderators of CreepShots, sometimes naming them publicly (and getting a teacher fired for posting cameraphone shots of his students -- ick).

Jezebel published an article about outing CreepShots moderators, and from that came the news that Adrian Chen at Gawker was getting set to expose one of the more well known moderators/trolls on the site, ViolentAcrez. Before this even came out, some of the moderators on one of the most popular subreddit, /r/Politics announced that they were banning links to all Gawker sites "until action is taken to correct this serious lack of ethics and integrity." Chen went on to publish the story anyway -- a well-written, thoroughly detailed story about the guy, Michael Brutsch, who admits to enjoy being a "troll" in order to get a reaction out of people. Over the weekend, Brutsch was apparently fired from his job.

There has been a lot of talk about all of this -- and about the ethics of pretty much everyone involved. Someone named Navneet Alang directly challenged us, claiming that if Facebook had "censored" an article, we'd be "raging" about it -- but that since we're somehow aligned with Reddit, that's not the case.

The truth -- as always -- is a lot more complex. First of all, let me be clear on a few things: I think that /r/CreepShots and various other subreddits like that are very troubling and ethically dubious. I equally think that the decision to ban Gawker stories from certain subreddits was stupid and really counterproductive if the intent was to draw attention away from the article. That said, the goal may have been more to create chilling effects for other journalists. And, on that front, I'm with Adrian Chen. I think he did a fantastic piece of reporting (actual journalism, yay) and should not be punished for doing so. I tend to think it makes the mods who decided to do the ban look childish and, if not directly hypocritical, very much open to charges of hypocrisy.

That said, the situation is not so simple. This is not the same thing as Facebook banning links -- because that's a company's decision that impacts its users. Reddit, on the other hand, has always been driven by its users with the mods having significant power over each subreddit they control. If they want to make a decision like banning every Gawker site -- no matter how stupid and counterproductive such a decision might be -- they have the right to do so. In some ways, the "Facebook analogy" would be more proper if the person had said that any individual had the power to block links on their own wall. Which they do -- and which no one complains about.

The different subreddits are playgrounds controlled by those mods, not by "Reddit" itself. Sometimes amazing things come out of there, and sometimes absolute crap comes out of there. This is the nature of the internet, and shutting down something or silencing one's speech doesn't change any of that. It just reshuffles the deck.

I believe quite strongly in the importance of anonymity online -- but that's mainly to the extent that the government should not be able to force anonymous speech to be connected to the speaker, except in extreme circumstances. That, however, is entirely different than an enterprising reporter discovering the details that connect someone's account to their name. The accusations by various Reddit moderators that this is somehow an unfair "doxxing" seems like an extreme overreaction. Chen put together information and reported on it. That's journalism.

But, at the same time, I think it's unfair to blame Reddit itself or its management for the (admittedly dumb) decision to block links to Gawker. Reddit is very much about what it's community decides it wants to do, and with that comes some good and bad decisions. I can (and will) criticize what I think is a bad decision by the moderators who did this, but that doesn't mean a condemning of Reddit as a whole, any more than criticizing someone who blocks others from posting to his Facebook wall or Google Groups or personal blog, automatically implicates those platform providers.

Free speech does not mean you are free from the consequences of your speech. And, in the end result, this whole situation encapsulates the power of "more speech" being the best answer to "bad speech." A giant conversation has been started and (almost) none of it has involved getting the law involved to step in and decide who is bad and who is good. Instead, in occasionally messy ways, the community is working out its own norms, and that's fascinating to watch.

Filed Under: adrian chen, creepshots, doxxing, free speech, michael brutsch, violentacrez
Companies: reddit