By EU vs Disinfo Facebook and Instagram have removed a total of 203 accounts linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency that were operating out of Ghana and Nigeria and targeted the United States. Earlier this month, a cross-platform social media influence operation linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA) but run from Africa was exposed through a joint investigation involving CNN, Facebook, Twitter, social media analytics firm Graphika, and researchers…
By Polygraph Sputnik News Russian state funded radio broadcaster “Russia has been repeatedly accused of meddling in the US elections by Western powers. However, subsequent probes failed to find evidence pointing to any Russian interference in the US election.” Source: Sputnik News, September 30, 2019 False U.S. probes resulted in proof, indictments On Monday, September 30, the U.S. Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced it had taken…
BeeBright/Shutterstock Xymena Kurowska, Aberystwyth University et Anatoly Reshetnikov, Central European University Russian “troll factories” have been making headlines for some time. First, as the Kremlin’s digital guardians in the Russian blogosphere. Then, as subversive cyber-squads meddling with US elections. While there has been much sensationalist talk about troll brigades, there have also been thorough investigations of first party sources and genuine leaks. Indeed, some (mostly former) Russian trolls have been…
Since spring 2014, thousands of fake LiveJournal blogs have been mass-posting content promoting a pro-Kremlin stance on world events, attacking Western leaders and praising Russian president Vladimir Putin. Using custom Python code, Lawrence Alexander was able to isolate and analyze these accounts. Delving deeper into the metadata of the supporting Twitter bot network could provide further clues as to their origin. After my previous article exposed and examined the hundreds of Russian Twitter bots marked out by…
For about a month last year, posters advertising a touring art exhibition called Material Evidence. Syria. Ukraine were nearly impossible to avoid in New York City. The show itself stunk unmistakably of Russian propaganda, and recently unearthed emails suggest that it was financed in part by the Kremlin’s online propaganda agency. Material Evidence, which ran through September and October 2014 in an enormous Chelsea warehouse space, presented large-scale photos taken…
The phenomenon of “troll factories” or “troll farms” operating on the RuNet and beyond to shape the conversations and sentiment online has by now received wide coverage in both Russian and international media. In many cases, reporters have relied on testimonies from whistleblowers who work or have worked for one of the alleged “troll factories.” At the end of May a woman named Lyudmila Savchuk announced that she was suing…
Anonymous International last week uploaded hacked correspondence alleged to be between employees and their superiors at the Internet Research Agency, a secretive company based in the village of Olgino near St. Petersburg, which revealed its extensive pro-Kremlin activities on the Internet. The correspondence showed that paid bloggers and commenters have been heavily used to infiltrate the Internet forums of Western media outlets and blogs, even posing as Westerners despite their…
