The St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency just seems like such a tiny operation.
In an internet with hundreds of millions of users, a group of a couple hundred trolls would have nowhere near the effect of having something like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy
working to promote certain interests.
Oh yea!... National Endowment for Democracy ...they are on line, on the ground, in Washington, Universities...pretty much everywhere.
..and all their “call Ups” for other groups.
“The St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency just seems like such a tiny operation.”
The relative size and scope of the St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency can hardly be described as “a tiny operation” when compared to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency is being funded with about $13 million per year according to documents leaked by hackers. That amount of funding for the St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency alone is about one-third to seven-eighths of the funding for NED in a given year. A major difference, however, is that NED’s funding of $15 million to $30 million per year is for program around the world, the great majority of which has nothing to do with the funding of Internet trolls. So, by itself the St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency has substantially grater funding used for Internet trolls than NED has for all forms of Internet propaganda, trolls and otherwise. Then you have to take into account that the St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency is only one of many such Russian troll mills with comparable and greater funding. So, NED is completely dwarfed by the Russian government’s Internet trolling operations. Finally, the character and purpose of the Russian Internet trolling operations are quite different from that of NED.