Putin's New Weapon In The Ukraine Propaganda War: Internet Trolls
The internet troll army’s selling of the Kremlin’s parallel universe to the Russian people and to a skeptical Western audience is a matter of life and death for the Putin regime. If the Russian people do not buy their story, Putin loses the high “ratings” on which his regime rests. If he cannot convince his Western audience, Europe and the United States will take actions that spoil his Novorossiya ventures and threaten his regime. Trolling is a high stakes business that Putin takes seriously and the West must not underestimate.
Putin’s Alice-in-Wonderland can be wacky, mind boggling, irritating, disgusting, cynical, and incorrigible, but underlying it is a sinister narrative of an alternate reality, cleverly designed to promote Putin’s goals and head off effective Western actions.
Putin has used a troll army throughout his presidency that went largely unnoticed prior to the Crimean invasion. The Kremlin indeed requires an “army” to construct a new universe parallel to the “real universe” in which we live. Google counts 1.5 million media entries under “Putin attacks Ukraine.” The trolls must convince their audience that the Google entry should read instead “Ukraine attacks Russia.” Quite a job!
But remember: In Putin’s parallel universe, there is no troll army. They are a fantasy of Western paranoia. It is, however, a fact that these “non-existent” trolls overwhelm “comments” sections of media to render meaningful dialogue impossible. The Guardian’s editor reported 40,000 comments a day by an “orchestrated pro-Kremlin campaign” of pro-Russia trolling on Ukraine stories. Harassed by the flood, some publications have decided to close their comments sections
My trolls differ by language skills and by level of sophistication. Before I started to attract larger audiences, my trolls wrote bad and sometimes incomprehensible English. My favorite is from “Andrey” who wrote two consecutive comments back in February, which I quote:
“Dear PAUL , request your opinion on the Ukraine and Russia keep. And please don’t interfere in our political and economic life. With Respect, Andrey.” And then: “Dear PAUL, can we badly know English language, but only one thing I want to say, YOU understand — Fack You.” (Russians have trouble pronouncing “u”).
The “Andreys” have been replaced by “ace” trolls, such as “Jeff” and “RussM,” with an occasional guest rant by “aij” against “filthy Jewish bankers.” My most prolific troll, “Jeff,” usually posts multiple comments – at times almost fifty per column. My trolls do not limit themselves to the written word. One appeared in person to pester me at a panel discussion.
In the trolls’ parallel universe, there is doubt as to whether I even exist. One troll volunteered that my bio is pure fiction. There is no Paul Gregory of the Hoover Institution. Putin assumes his enemies do what he does. Why should someone claiming to be me not be someone else?
and much more ...Trolls never concede even when their back is to the wall. When I published videos of the same Russian actor playing the triple role of heroic surgeon, neo-fascist financier, and innocent bystander, one troll “saw no contradictions,” while another (pretending to be from the BBC) claimed that his team staged fake photos of crying people and dead bodies during the Georgian conflict. Trolls dismissed my disclosure that a Facebook portrait of a “physician” anguished by “neo Nazi” atrocities was lifted from a North Caucasus dental-clinic brochure as “a sad piece of propaganda from this joke (Gregory) who seems to suffer some insecure condition and a compulsion for stupid ad hominem attacks.” When Russia’s Channel One showed crude photo shops of a Ukrainian jet shooting down MH17, the trolls countered that Russian television is not in the business of certifying video – after of course Russian viewers had been assured that a Ukraine jet was the cause of the crash.
Trolls do not hesitate to deny the obvious. My reports that Russian weapons are crossing freely into east Ukraine drew the response (unedited): “wow is this guy full of it, everything he says at the beginning is nothing BUT LIES! russia did not give the east ANYTHING.” My trolls also lie about verifiable facts. One “Stanley Ford,” identifying himself as a graduate student in economics at Stanford, expressed his dismay about my “shallow” Stanford seminar. I checked. There is no such graduate student in the Stanford economics department, and I have no idea what “seminar” Stanley was referring to.
