http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america
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Kremlin pays internet trolls to flatter Putin
Ben Hoyle - Moscow
October 11 2013
Russian investigative journalists and bloggers have uncovered an army of internet trolls paid to pour invective on the Kremlin's opponents and heap praise on President Putin.
Posing as job applicants, the reporters discovered the government hacks working at a small company called the St Petersburg Internet Research Agency. ..."
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article3891720.ece
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British newspaper The Guardian notes that recently, readers have been complaining of pro-Russia propaganda being posted in the comments section of articles about Russia and Ukraine.
One reader wrote to The Guardian:
"One need only pick a Ukraine article at random, pick any point in the comments at random, and they will find themselves in a sea of incredibly aggressive and hostile users (the most obvious have accounts created since February 2014 ... but there also exist those who registered with the Guardian before the high point of the crisis) who post the most biased, inciteful [sic] pro-Kremlin, anti-western propaganda that seems as if it's taken from a template, so repetitive are the statements. Furthermore, these comments are consistently capturing inordinate numbers of 'recommends', sometimes on the order of 10 to 12 times what pro-Ukrainian comments receive."
Guardian comment moderators believe this is an orchestrated campaign.
Russia has worked hard to make people believe that the country is supporting the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine and defending those people against some type of threat. These "comment mills" play into that strategy.
Last year, The Atlantic wrote about how the Russian government apparently pays people to "sit in a room, surf the Internet, and leave sometimes hundreds of postings a day that criticize the country's opposition and promote Kremlin-backed policymakers."
This practice isn't new, according to The Atlantic. But it can stifle open discussion about political issues in Russia, giving a louder voice to those who support the Kremlin.
http://www.businessinsider.com/putin-paying-people-to-post-pro-russia-propaganda-in-comments-2014-5
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"The term 'useful idiots' has been attributed to Lenin, as a description of those mindless people in the Western democracies who would always find ways to excuse whatever the Soviet Union did. Columnist Mona Charen's new book Useful Idiots shows that such people are still with us.
Long after the Soviet Union's horrors had become too widely known around the world for their sympathizers in the West to be able to get away with whitewashing the USSR, new Communist dictatorships arose to become the new objects of the affections of the Western intelligentsia and of like-minded people in the media and in politics. ..."
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2003/05/20/useful_idiots
GO PUTIN!!!!!!"
--posted on 2/1/2016, by DeathBeforeDishonor1