[rev]

Well documented analysis of a corpus of comments on some Latvian sites, yes. Anything in 100+ pages serving as a proof of Kremlin connections with the "hybrid trolls" (gotta love the newspeak)? Not so much. I don't know whether Russians are xenophobic aggressive bastards or knights in shining armor exposing the wrongdoings of others, it's just that claims along the lines like "Russia uses online trolling" seem exaggerated.

[throwaway71958]

Russian here: Russia very definitely does use online trolling domestically (same as the US I guess). They also use paid "pro-government" rally attendees. That's very well documented, including direct video evidence on Youtube.

I very much doubt they're competent enough to pull something like this convincingly here in the US and avoid early detection and counter-intelligence response. Thus far no evidence whatsoever was presented that any of this was Russian, let alone state sponsored. That's either some truly elite level GRU work, to the standard we have not ever seen before, or there is, in fact, no "paid Russian trolls" on The_Donald. My opinion: there's no way in hell they could pull this off without getting noticed _well before_ the anointed Democratic candidate lost the election.

[mistermann]

> They also use paid "pro-government" rally attendees.

Christ, even the Canadian government does this, and we're about as unsophisticated as it gets.

The naivete of people getting their panties in a bunch over the revelation that The Evil Russians participate in hacking and propaganda, how can you be so unaware of how the world works?

[doktrin]

> claims along the lines like "Russia uses online trolling" seem exaggerated.

What?

gamergate, /pol, /b, alt-right, the_donald, antifa use online trolling. In context, saying a state actor uses online trolling is an extremely conservative claim. I'm sure there's online trolling in favor of and sponsored by US, Chinese and Macedonian interests (to name a few) too - but Russia's actions are much better documented.

[rev]

Alacritous state actors more nimble at trolling than 4chan? You decide, I don't care. My problem is that US, Chinese, Russian and Macedonian sponsorships by state actors are equally unproved - if you read into "Trolls from Olgino" reports carefully. US's sponsorship is objectively less probable: English being lingua franca hampers American wannabe "hybrid trolls" [0].

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/fillin...

[doktrin]

> My problem is that US, Chinese, Russian and Macedonian sponsorships by state actors are equally unproved

Disagree. There's no such thing as perfect certainty, but the only real question about Russian troll sponsorship is one of scale.

https://globalvoices.org/2015/04/02/analyzing-kremlin-twitte...

> US's sponsorship is objectively less probable: English being lingua franca hampers American wannabe "hybrid trolls"

This is an interesting observation, but I think you either underestimate American resources, or overestimate the logistics of online influence manipulation campaigns.

For illustration : there are about 1m fluent Russian speakers in the US, and about 4m fluent English speakers in Russia. Sure, it's a bigger talent pool : but both countries could rope in bilingual cyber propagandists by the thousands if they felt so inclined.