Online media should treat Kremlin troll army comments like what they are: Spamming

[True Blue Door]

When a foreign dictatorship organizes an army of paid trolls to hammer every single English-language news and political website on the web with 24/7 scripted propaganda, that's not people expressing an outrageous opinion - that's spam. Unfortunately, most website comment moderators don't appear to have caught on, and it's really gotten out of hand: Sites as diverse as Bloomberg.com, the Guardian, and liberal blogs are being inundated with unhinged Kremlin talking points, and they're being allowed to stink up the joint with little or no intervention.

It's surreal, like if late 1930s Nazi Germany were just suddenly right here in the 21st century, suddenly in control of the world's largest spam operation, and suddenly flooding the entire internet with deranged screeds promoting fascism and demonizing Western civilization and democracy. But it's been going on for months and these websites do nothing whatsoever about it. A dozen different usernames may post "Death to the enemies of Novorossiya!" or some similarly psychotic slogan in the span of five minutes, and still be left up in the comments of a "mainstream" news organization site.

And it's not like it's hard to notice this trolling - it's painfully conspicuous, utterly brazen, and unfolds 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Moreover, we know it's not people within Russia merely expressing their spontaneous opinions, because the Russian internet has been cut off behind a China-style national censor net, and the opinions expressed by these trolls are 100% pro-Putin and anti-Western. This is, frankly, an attack by the Russian state on the global free internet they deny their own citizens.

The people who bear responsibility for their sites' commenting systems need to actually exercise that responsibility, and stop tolerating 24/7 spam attacks by a hostile foreign government that shouts down actual people trying to communicate with each other. It's totally out of control, to the point where fascist troll-spam can outnumber real comments 10-to-1 or even 100-to-1. What are these websites thinking, allowing that? Are they being threatened with hacking if they try to stop it? What's going on?

[msongs]

1. I get all my unbiased russian propaganda-free putin worship from RT and its minions lol

[True Blue Door]

2. I'm surprised RT hasn't just changed its name already to Putin Pravda.

[Tarheel_Dem]

3. Exactly! And they aren't even clever.

[True Blue Door]

6. But still they get away with it, completely.

Which raises the question of how and why. Are they bribing the people who directly run these sites to let them do this? Are they threatening financially costly hacking attacks if they're blocked?

Or was it just that some corporate accountant told them that the possibility of such attacks, and the potential cost of preventing them, meant it wasn't worth doing so?

I'd ask them directly, but I doubt they'd respond - and of course whenever I ask publicly on these news sites, the comments are removed within minutes or seconds while the "Heil Putin" chorus continues uninterrupted.

[Tarheel_Dem]

9. You only have to look downthread to see why they feel they can "get away with it".

Any talk of America defending itself, and its global interests, will be met with reflections of Bush II, with no acknowledgement that the current administration is as far from the hawkish Neocon crap we got used to back then. Every other country, including Russia, can become as nationalist and isolationist as they want & we're supposed to ignore it.

Russia is a threat to our allies, which is why we're FINALLY seeing some movement in Europe toward isolating Putin. I think they now realize that he will stop at nothing, will tell any lie necessary, and Ukraine may not be his final conquest.

[True Blue Door]

11. Since most of those sites eagerly censor on every other topic, it would be ludicrous

for them to claim that overwhelming respect for "free speech" keeps them from stopping a foreign government spam operation from posting bigoted lies en masse and shouting down actual commenters. They know what's going on, and they're choosing not to do anything about it - either for financial reasons, or out of fear.

[snappyturtle]

4. Be careful of what you wish for. nt

[True Blue Door]

5. What does that mean?

Most of these sites already moderate with a pretty heavy hand - they just refuse to do so against an overwhelming propaganda operation with real-world consequences.

I've had comments removed from news sites for questioning the provenance of a photograph or the credibility of a source, but these trolls spew racist tirades, call for World War 3 against the West on Western media news sites, and are left alone. It's insane.

It would be one thing if these sites were ordinarily free-for-alls, but mostly they're moderated up the ass - just not when the offender is a Kremlin troll spamming totalitarian propaganda through six dozen sockpuppet names simultaneously for the past four months.

Unless these sites are simply being overwhelmed, and have for some reason done nothing about it for months, I'm hard-pressed to come up with explanations that don't involve caving to undisclosed threats or accepting bribes. Maybe a handful of the people who run those systems could be so delusional as to think they're somehow standing up for free speech by tolerating overwhelming floods of government spam from a fascist state, but it's just too widespread.

This is not normal. If they did the same thing in the flesh, it would be akin to a team of Russian information officers showing up in every town in Western civilization to blare propaganda from loudspeakers 24/7.

[CJCRANE]

8. I've haven't seen much of that on Western media.

I read the Guardian and Daily Mail comments to get a good balance of liberal and conservative viewpoints.

There is a healthy suspicion on both sites in regards to what US, UK and European governments say based on the fact we've seen this movie before in the Bush/Blair years.

The real anti-Western stuff is on Press TV and RT, which is fair enough, that's what those sites are for.

[True Blue Door]

12. I don't know what comments you're reading

but at least on Guardian (I haven't read Daily Mail), they're routinely flooded with unhinged, nakedly pro-Putin propaganda claiming that Russia has an inherent right to invade and annex any country with a Russian-speaking minority if it feels like it. And the language of comments like that is always virtually identical, same fascistic slogans, same rhetoric.

If you're claiming such fascist ideological spam is the spontaneous opinions of free people with liberal and anti-war opinions, I can only laugh.

[CJCRANE]

13. I'd like to see some examples then.

[CJCRANE]

7. Whatever happened to freedom of speech?

We don't all agree with our government's policies.

In fact, I feel like we've entered a new neocon era, reminiscent of when Ari Fleischer said "you better watch what you say".

[True Blue Door]

10. You didn't bother to read the OP, did you?

[CJCRANE]

14. I don't agree with the OP. It's the same neocon bluster

designed to stifle freedom of speech.

We went through this in the Bush era with the insults of "unpatriotic", "traitor", "Saddam lover" etc.

[snappyturtle]

15. Thank you...that was my point above...stifling freedom of speech.

I didn't realize my comment was so cloaked!