Inside Russian troll factories trying to turn progressive websites into Duma Underground

[uhnope]

The Duma were council assemblies that were created by Czar Nicholas II. It is a form of Russian governmental institution that was formed during the reign of the last Czar, Nicholas II.

[Renew Deal]

1. Sputnik News FTW

Someone posted an article from a Russian source today saying we should be thanking Assad.

[Rotegard]

2. Spare us

The MIC hates Putin. It is unfortunate that in most cases he is right about them.
\

[uhnope]

3. welcome to DU enjoy yr stay

[leveymg]

27. The guy is right. As for you, people who live in glass houses . . .

But, that gif is priceless.

[uhnope]

28. thanks, but you have no idea

what you're talking about

[leveymg]

37. I would put your rock collection away. Please see #35, below. n/t

[LiberalArkie]

4. As a Teenager I did not really believe the news that was on the TV. I had a shortwave

radio and I would listen to Radio Moscow, Radio Netherlands, BBC and Voice of America. Between all of them I knew what was really going on in the south. I knew about Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. I knew better than to trust any one of them, but by listening to all of them I got a fairly good picture of what the world was like.

I don't trust, RT, or Al Jazeera, or Sputnik or any of the news services any where. But you take them all and juggle the info in your head a little bit and you can tell the truth. Most Liberals do that all the time. Conservatives only trust the news service the listen to. Be it Limbaugh, or Fox or Drudge. That way they are never challenged to make a decision.

[Cheese Sandwich]

19. +1 Radio Moscow short wave radio in the 1980s

BBC was great too.

It's so important to get different perspectives.

[Ford_Prefect]

5. Can anyone guess the address of the NSA or DOD office assigned to do the same program here?

[uhnope]

7. lol. & UFOs & Bigfoot & Illuminati, right?

[Ford_Prefect]

15. I was thinking of a location in Fort Meade, but there may also be a choice spot over near Arlington.

Last edited Tue Dec 1, 2015, 03:09 AM - Edit history (2)

Both sites are known to dispense quite a bit of timely propaganda, typically whenever budget talks or election cycles roll around, or on the odd occasion when Congress starts to ask the right kind of question. I'm not suggesting that the primary output of these institutions is exclusively intended to mislead or confuse taxpayers and Congress. However, I'm told the surrounding atmosphere can get remarkably pungent.

[uhnope]

25. "are known"?

How are they "known"?

I see the opposite--every time there is even a hint that some gov't agency is working that way on the internet to influence opinion, it's a big controversy. Look at the wikipedia congressional edits "scandal" (which was much ado about nothing). If you can show any proof that the NSA or DOD or USAID or the county dogcatcher is trolling, I'd like to see it.

You have no comment on the established fact that the Kremlin really is doing that? If you're so concerned about (what I see as mythical) US trolling, what do you say about the Russian sockpuppet BS machine?

[leveymg]

35. You really don't read much on these subjects before you post and make declarations, do you?

The term is "public diplomacy" or "perception management" not "trolling." It isn't just a game played by the Russians.

Most US global perception management comes from the State Department, its contractors and foreign program beneficiaries, since USIA was folded into State Public Diplomacy and Public Affiars in 1999. http://www.publicdiplomacycouncil.org/commentaries/11-11-15/murphy-and-kuehl-national-information-strategy-i-%E2%80%93-introduction

During the Cold War, the two note, “USIA was to act as the agency responsible for achieving strategic cognitive information effects globally in support of U.S. strategy and policy.” Currently, however, “no single executive government agency is in charge of the information instrument of national power overall.” Looking beyond connectivity, they see inadequate attention to “content” and its linkages with “cognitive effects” (might we say “influence”?).

USIA was folded into the Department of State in 1999, so the Public Diplomacy cone has succeeded to this national imperative. I’m not aware that any other branch of government has claimed it.

The State Department runs what it classifies as $330 million in "non-lethal assistance" to the Syrian opposition. The Department describes the media component of that as follows:

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2014/09/232266.htm
Home » Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs » Bureau of Public Affairs » Bureau of Public Affairs: Office of Press Relations » Press Releases » Press Releases: 2014 » Press Releases: September 2014 » Syrian Crisis: U.S. Assistance and Support for the Transition
Syrian Crisis: U.S. Assistance and Support for the Transition

Fact Sheet
Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
September 29, 2014

U.S. non-lethal assistance includes training and equipment to build the capacity of a network of more than 3,000 grassroots activists, including women and youth, from more than 400 opposition councils and organizations from around the country to link Syrian citizens with the national- and local-level Syrian opposition. This support enhances the linkages between Syrian activists, human rights organizations, and independent media outlets and empowers women leaders to play a more active role in transition planning.

Support to independent media includes assistance to both television and radio stations; mentoring from Arab media experts to broadcast professionals inside Syria; training for networks of citizen journalists, bloggers, and cyber-activists to support their documentation and dissemination of information on developments in Syria; and technical assistance and equipment to enhance the information and communications security of Syrian activists within Syria. U.S. technical and financial assistance is also supporting the Coalition’s outreach to Syrians through the internet, local, independent radio stations, and satellite television.

An example of a program funded through State to achieve "strategic cognitive information effects" is as follows: https://consortiumnews.com/2014/12/25/selling-peace-groups-on-us-led-wars/

Syrian dissidents received funding from the Los Angeles-based Democracy Council, which ran a Syria-related program called the “Civil Society Strengthening Initiative” funded with $6.3 million from the State Department. The program is described as “a discrete collaborative effort between the Democracy Council and local partners” to produce, among other things, “various broadcast concepts.”

James Prince, the founder and President of the Democracy Council, is also an adviser to CyberDissidents.org , a project created in 2008 by the Jerusalem-based Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, founded and funded by Sheldon Adelson, a patron and confidant of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Other resources include postings on social media and alternative websites with sensational stories such as the anti-Assad activist “Gay Girl in Damascus” who turned out to be a middle-aged American man in Scotland or Syrian Danny Abdul Dayem, who was frequently interviewed using fake gun fire and flames in his interviews.

[uhnope]

39. fail. + I know enough to not look in Consortium News for anything

your first two texts don't say much at all and are very vague. The first is from some rinkydink think tank. The second is about State Dept efforts in Syria. You'll have to do much better than that if you are trying to show some kind of equivalency to the Russian troll factories, sorry.

Thanks for the humorous opinion column written by a registered nurse in Consortium News--a joke, the guy just publishes whatever he's told to publish by whoever pays him, lately the Kremlin. But even so that opinion text in no way presents anything close to the Russian shill farms. Funny that even though you are obviously desperate to do find something, this is the best you can do. You're kind of proving the opposite of what you're trying to prove.

[leveymg]

41. When you add up all the propaganda programs funded by USDOS, they dwarf the Russian shill farms

Not even close. Like DOD budget, USG "public diplomacy" programs dwarf the efforts of the next half-dozen countries put together. That's the bigger picture that you are missing. Like the Russian opposition, we have to obtain non-official info from foreign sources to complete the picture. The material I presented on State Department Syria perception management operations is just a specific example, complete with agencies, departments, contractors, budgets, and concrete examples of deceptive practices. There are a dozen more USG programs just like it.

You give us nothing but bileous opinion and simplistic "evil Putin" characture, which is actually very funny. Thanks for the animation, but your material is not very persuasive. Without reasoned argument, multiple reliable sources, and accurate information to back up your POV, you're just another propagandist wannabe wasting everyone's time here.

[uhnope]

43. more wild claims that you're pulling out of your

hat.

I give plenty of documentation. You act like Russian troll farms aren't real. And then you make allegations that you have no proof of at all. "all the propaganda programs funded by USDOS, they dwarf the Russian shill farms." Laughable claim which you just blurt out like a brainwashed apparatchik talking in their sleep.

But it's hilarious to see you defend a fascist country that has destroyed its own free press by blathering about "USDOS"--please don't stop. Tell us some more about how "USDOS" is poisoning the world and Russia only wants peace and freedom.

[Ford_Prefect]

36. Uhnope, It seems that you do not believe in the whole dis-information function of spy networks.

I never said the Russians were not doing it. In fact I am surprised that anyone would think they would not. The very nature of spying is to act outside the rules to gain an advantage. The OP claims and I believe it is so that there is a Russian program underway to influence public opinion about a whole range of issues and agendas via the internet using false information and participants on various sites. It only makes sense that they are doing so, trolls included.

I do not approve of it, nor do I imagine the US intelligence community would refrain from similar tactics. What in the world did you think Radio Free Europe and Radio Marti were all about?

As for whether there is similar activity among US agencies to influence domestic American public opinion, we only need look to the recent past in which an office was established for exactly that purpose. Or did you miss that one? We were informed that the program was ruled to be inappropriate if not illegal, and it was "closed". Past experience suggests it was more likely renamed and that the program only became public so that they could then pretend to remove it. Off-shoring of such kinds of activities is an old practice at the State Department, CIA and quite recently the NSA.

There is a long tradition of conditioning the voting public to prepare them for whatever the State Department or other agencies have in mind. Domestic propaganda is certainly not a new phenomenon whether it is subtle or overt. I doubt that the Intel Community would be able to resist using so effective a tactic. Our esteemed political parties have been engaged in it for some time, as we have seen here at DU.

[uhnope]

40. you're comparing apples to orangutans

RFE & Radio Marti are above board. Anyone can listen to them. If they get caught pushing BS or dripping bias it's a big thing. Have you ever checked out RFE/RL? They are middle of the road broadcasts. It doesn't even compare to a Russian troll farm.

"we only need look to the recent past in which an office was established for exactly that purpose." Could you be more specific?

"Off-shoring of such kinds of activities is an old practice at the State Department, CIA and quite recently the NSA." Unsubstantiated allegation--again, any cases of this get huge exposure, so can you be more specific?

Your whole last paragraph is the same--"There is a long tradition of conditioning the voting public to prepare them for whatever the State Department or other agencies have in mind." Vague. Could be anything from secret propaganda to Public Service Announcements.

[Ford_Prefect]

42. I get the feeling we had some of this conversation before over comments about Snowden...

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

22. lol? Their people have been writing papers on how to do it for years.

Here's a 5 or 6 year old link to a Salon article about Susan Powers' husband Cass Sunstein saying the government needs to do just that.

http://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/

The only people who say social media psy-ops are tinfoil territory are the incredibly naive, the foolish, or those already on the payroll.

[Rotegard]

6. Goethe said it best:"Wilst du ins Unendliche schreiten, Geh nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten"

"To perceive the infinite, look at at the finite and infinite number of ways"

When Hilary's State Dept bought Facebook likes from Troll factories in Baghdad I don't doubt the efforts of Russian propagandists to skew polls and chatboards their direction. Nonetheless since Putin published his dead-on piece a few years back in the New York Times about the dangers of "exceptionalism" and its foreign policy fallout, I have seen a massive rise of Russian bashing on "Liberal" boards like this one. The neocon who got us unto Iraq, sponsored the coup in the Ukraine, and want to get us into Syria really really hate/fear him and usually bash him for disingenuous reasons.
American foreign policy has been getting innocent people killed since as long as I have published on it (New Republic 1960s). I am very wary of folks how don't realize that the biggest threats to American democracy usually wear flags and try to scare us with tales of malevolent foreigners.

[uhnope]

9. double plus good to include Hillary conspiracy theory, nice touch!

and the "sponsored the coup in the Ukraine" CT also! Two conspiracy theories in one post.

Very entertaining that you are posting these preformed posts praising Putin in a thread about Russian trolls.

[Rotegard]

12. Gee I 've gotta work on my prose style

If it seems pre-formed to you I must really be getting rusty here is south Minneapolis.

[tecelote]

17. +1

"...the biggest threats to American democracy usually wear flags and try to scare us with tales of malevolent foreigners."

Well said.

[SunSeeker]

8. A lot of RT articles are posted here, which is disturbing. nt

[L. Coyote]

14. Some RT articles merit discussion.

And they are labeled RT.

[Rotegard]

10. It is a useful perspective..

Many years ago when I was writing for the Janes' group my British colleagues ragged on me for the fact that we had never had a black president here. My reply was that they still hadn't had an Irish PM.
All media has a point of view. All media has blind spots and implicit biases. Tossing RT and Al Jazeera out a-priori will only benefit those who have been planting in the American media since the beginning of the cold war.

[MisterP]

11. what's the equivalents? Parliament Underground? Knesset Underground? Japanese Diet Underground?

People's Consultative Assembly Underground? National Congress of Honduras Underground?

[Rotegard]

13. The Church Committee 1970s

Last edited Tue Dec 1, 2015, 05:46 AM - Edit history (1)

During the height of the cold war it was documented that the CIA had over 200 paid agents in American media. By all accounts our media is more compromised now than in the 60's and 70s. My own perspective is that the only things the CIA (and Friends) are really good at are orchestrating the American media and Stealth Banking. When it comes to real political analysis, such as my old teachers who bailed out of State Dept Intel after the Kennedy years, that is a lost art.

The lady doth protest too much.

[nationalize the fed]

16. CIA Director William Casey Quote

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -CIA Director William Casey

I was looking for verification and found this:

Posted by: Barbara Honegger 25 Nov 2014

I am the source for this quote, which was indeed said by CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of the newly elected President Reagan with his new cabinet secretaries to report to him on what they had learned about their agencies in the first couple of weeks of the administration.

The meeting was in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, not far from the Cabinet Room. I was present at the meeting as Assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser to the President.

Casey first told Reagan that he had been astonished to discover that over 80 percent of the 'intelligence' that the analysis side of the CIA produced was based on open public sources like newspapers and magazines.

As he did to all the other secretaries of their departments and agencies, Reagan asked what he saw as his goal as director for the CIA, to which he replied with this quote, which I recorded in my notes of the meeting as he said it. Shortly thereafter I told Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who was a close friend and colleague, who in turn made it public. Barbara Honegger [e-mail]
https://www.quora.com/Did-William-Casey-CIA-Director-really-say-Well-know-our-disinformation-program-is-complete-when-everything-the-American-public-believes-is-false

Even if he didn't say it that goal has been achieved, and anyone that believes stooges like Brian Williams hasn't been paying attention

[uhnope]

34. Honegger's not much of a source. nt

[Enthusiast]

18. LMAO! We can be glad we don't live in a country with armies of paid sockpuppets

generating a steady stream of false information.

[Cheese Sandwich]

21. LOL!

[Fast Walker 52]

24. Indeed. And what are the odds that US sockpuppets are commenting on this post?

[uhnope]

31. or Bigfoot. Maybe Bigfoot is commenting on this post.

if you want to indulge paranoid fantasies, go all out.

[uhnope]

26. Yeah, and we're also under constant attack of UFOs that want to eat us

you might want a check up in the paranoid fantasy department

[Enthusiast]

44. I don't happen to "believe" in UFOs. Your insults will not persuade me to believe in the Red Scare.

[Cheese Sandwich]

20. US government and corporations do the same thing or worse.

[uhnope]

30. Hilariously whacked claim. You can prove it, right?

[mother earth]

38. No, CS, not our gov't too? Corporations? Lobbyists? MIC? and on & on, waving the flag and

carrying a cross...next they'll be dictating law to our Congress, and demanding personhood from the highest court...so much agenda, while we have to worry about the red scourge again...RT..bad...bad..very bad. Switch the station to CNN fear/porn...CNN good.

[HoosierCowboy]

23. We don't have propaganda machines?

Or were you born yesterday?

[Tarheel_Dem]

29. And I don't understand why they aren't shown the door immediately. nt

[uhnope]

32. it's weird. US neocons are rightly shown the door. Russian neocons get a pat on the back

[Tarheel_Dem]

33. There's a reason they've chosen "progressive" websites. The tolerance for this is baffling to me.

Despite the pushback, and the apples to oranges rationalizations you've gotten from a particular group, I appreciate you keeping us informed about the underhanded tactics of the Kremlin and it's puppets.