Interesting, though one has to wonder how this guy is still alive. Plausible deniability ? Regardless, I preferred it when trolls lived under bridges and ate goats. Life was better then.
For months, Vitaly Bespalov, 26, was one of hundreds of workers pumping out misinformation online at the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll factory responsible for explosive content seen by 126 million Americans in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election. In many ways, the Agency [I'm not calling it the IRA as the original article does because to me that means something very different] was like a normal IT facility, Bespalov told NBC News in an exclusive broadcast interview. There were day shifts and night shifts, a cafeteria, and workers were seated at computers in a large open floor plan.
But in the squat, four-story concrete building on Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg, secured by camouflaged guards and turnstiles, bloggers and former journalists worked around the clock to create thousands of incendiary social media posts and news articles to meet specific quotas.
Bespalov told NBC News he "absolutely" believes the agency is connected to the Kremlin — a notion backed up by the U.S. intelligence community, which noted that a "close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence" is the "likely financier" of the agency.
Workers in the “American department” were paid the equivalent of between $1,300 to $2,000 a month for sparking social media uproar. Entry level trolls got only about $1,000 a month with paid bonuses.
Huh, I could earn more for trolling than doing this job... maybe in the next AAAAAAAA I'll throw in more pro-Putin/Trump hashtags...
https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/7dzm2e/russian_troll_describes_work_in_the/?ref=share&ref_source=link
The goal of these factories is not necessarily to successfully win people over to your point of view; but rather to make it seem that any point of view has support and to take arguments out of the fact based realm into subjective opinion. They serve to reduce trust in others and to make any fact learned on the internet unlikely to be true. Thus people will ignore any signal outside of sources they already trust. If you happen to be a nation state, and control those sources, you win. If you don't control those sources, then you're probably destabilizing that country by increasing distrust and partisanship, so you win again.
ReplyDeleteThus, knowledge of the existence of these factories serves their purpose further. I can, for example, argue that you probably aren't actually an astronomer, but part of a professionally paid Pro-EU troll factory in the Czech Republic attempting to undermine Britain's Glorious post-Brexit future. I'm going to go back to the Daily Mail now for news I can trust.