Troll Factories
Index 1. What is a troll factory? 2. What are their objectives? 3.Some examples of troll factories 4.Consequences and solutions
5.Bibliography
What is a troll factory? A troll factory is an organization that look to publish messages, posts or fake news on the internet and are intended to cause trouble, influence political views or make someone or something look good or bad.The Russian online propaganda offensive was launched after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
This building may seem like a completely normal building used for a small business or could even be residencial but it was uncovered to be one of Russia's troll factories.
What are their objectives?
Troll factories publish a large number of posts in any social network medium. These are usually published by fake users or by people who simply don't exist, and their main objective is to cause problems, influence the masses or even cause changes in the voters' choices and political views. A clear example of its political impact is the St. Petersburg Troll Factory, which has had an specific focus on election influence operations. For instance, in 2014 some journalist from Nevskie Novosti presented themselves to some city residents and asked them questions about the actual political situation and about their thoughts. But what they didn’t know is that those “journalist” were analysts from one of several projects established by the Internet Research Agency (IRA); the St. Petersburg troll factory. Their objective was to collect information that could be used to ensure a win for the ruling party, United Russia, and to assess which candidates would likely need vote count “corrections” by way of election fraud. Furthermore, while this operation was ongoing, the troll factory was already openly hiring English-speaking specialists.
Some examples of victims of troll factories A. In Finland
D.
In Greece
A. In France
E.
In Spain
A. In Germany
F.
In Europe
A. In Finland Jessikka Aro works for the Finnish national broadcaster YLE. In 2014, she was investigating the existence of pro-Russian troll factories. She was looking for evidences of a pro-Kremlin propaganda in Europe. Soon after Aro started looking into the story, she became the target of a systematic campaign of abuse
which has continued to the present day. Her personal information including her address, contact details and so on has appeared online. Besides, trolls have spread fake stories about her. Those fake news could have destroyed her life (They made a connection between her and racist neo-nazis websites, wrote she were a drug dealer‌..)
B. In France British and US media outlets reported in early December that Russian social media trolls were apparently involved in stoking the French "yellow vest" protests, for instance by disseminating disinformation like fake protest pictures. Journalists followed more than 600 Twitter that suddenly posted tweets with hashtags related to the yellow vests. They identified three kinds of Twitter accounts: those that are openly pro-Russian or are linked to the Kremlin, those that are operated by troll factories within and outside Russia, and finally those that are run by individuals around the world praising Russia.
The reporters suspect the trolls to target Macron instead of the yellow vests. Those people have long term objectives, they are not only focusing on the yellow vests.
C. In Germany Before the federal elections in September 2017, the activity of the trolls in Germany increased. They were playing both sides, supporting Merkel and attacking her. They also supported the AfD.
Even if the amount of tweets is far less than in the US, it is safe to say that those trolls tried to have an influence on the elections in Germany with nearly 3,000,000 tweets sent.
D. In Greece
During the European elections process in Greece, a russian troll twitter account posted photos of the polling stations, ballot boxes and ballot papers from several locations. The photos were accompanied by messages mocking a lack of security, saying that the elections in Russia are way better and that a fraud would be easily done here. The messages were multiplied by accounts later identified by Twitter as IRA-linked, too. That behaviour is unluckily often only a first step, with the goal to understand the voting process and potential weak points. The information might later be used to prepare public messaging saying the elections are fake, to affirm the president shouldn’t have been elected and to weaken the democracy.
E. In Spain Madrid claims Russia interfered in Catalonia's referendum by promoting independence on social media using fake accounts. Spanish ministers said they had evidence that Russian groups used social media to share and defend the separatist cause and change the public opinion before the referendum. Spain's defence and foreign ministers claims this was a calculated attempt to destabilise Spain.
F. In Europe According to researchers, 202 Twitter accounts, linked to the Internet Research Agency (more widely known as the St. Petersburg’s Troll Factory), were actively tweeting during the European election period in 2014. By 2016, English became the most used language by the IRA. Other languages were developed too, such as German, Spanish, Ukrainian, French, aso.They all seemed to be really interested about political events in the EU. The investigated accounts were, for example, posting messages against Alternative fßr Deutschland, to later support this German party, including retweeting its original posts. Others were supporting Angela Merkel and then spreading anti-refugee sentiments. Similar (including anti-migrant) messages were spread among the Austrian network. The fact that these messages were spread a few months before elections in both Germany and Austria (2017) can hardly be seen as a coincidence.
Consequences and solutions Because of troll factories, the social media is full of wrong information. People have to be careful and critical while reading a news. You have to think, which information you really believe. The really bad side of troll factories is that they can stole your identity and that’s a true problem. Usually this kind of actors can get famous by clicking. Our advice is: be sure about the information before you click it opened, because that gives the famous for the troll factories.
Bibliography: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/troll-factory https://www.dw.com/en/frances-yellow-vests-and-the-russian-trolls-that-encourage-them/a-46753388 https://www.stopfake.org/en/tag/troll-factories/ https://euvsdisinfo.eu/the-st-petersburg-troll-factory-targets-elections-from-germany-to-the-united-states/ https://www.dw.com/en/frances-yellow-vests-and-the-russian-trolls-that-encourage-them/a-46753388 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-41499789 https://mobile.twitter.com/raymserrato/status/1029805917443956736 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5078019/Spain-sees-Russian-interference-Catalonia-separatist-vote.html
Vote as I say Propaganda or the action of spreading fake news is a systematic attempt by an interested individual to control the actions and decisions of the majority of people. It is often used by politics in order to fulfil political goals such as gaining voters. Today propaganda has been usually associated with a manipulative approach. Politics usually use it by giving citizen a false impression of the quality of their country’s policy, by spreading false news or by hiding the truth. Nowadays, the technological development has been making the process of spreading fake news easier and easier. Fake news frequently spread through social media due to information overload and limited attention span, users allocate to the platforms particularly when little or no attention is paid to question their truthfulness.In addition, misinformation is also favored by factors related to the spiritual moral and the ideological orientation of the modern society. The moral and the ideological crisis of our time has leaded to a lack of interest in multifaceted information and the public’s preference for “digestible” issues that don’t require spiritual fatigue or deep questioning. Last but not least, the turn of the modern man in money and consumerism has as consequence his indifference to social and political developments and his passivity. Unfortunately, nowadays the examples of political misinformation are growing alarmingly. An example of local and statewide voter suppression misinformation was caused by one Facebook ad, run by North Dakota Democrats under a page titled “Hunters Alert”, that warned North Dakotans that they could lose their out-of-state hunting license if they voted in the midterm elections. The ad, whose claims was unsupported, was condemned by Republicans. They are also some misleading texts that appeared to be from President Trump. One Indiana resident submitted a text claiming that the recipient’s early ballot had not received.The texts which have reportedly been sent to residents of several states appear to be part of a get out the vote operation. These were two examples of the million others. We have already examined the causes of misinformation and have seen some examples but what about the consequences of this phenomenon? Unfortunately
misinformation causes negative and dangerous consequences in the modern society causing a climate of mistrust. First of all the freedom of citizens is being undermined because they are manipulated to serve the interest of politicians. Secondly, propaganda destroys the harmonious coexistence of human beings because people are divided into rival political factions.In addition to that, the existence of a war climate is also a consequence. The powerful people take advantage of the notion of patriotism to justify their aggressive policies, which causes the development of nationalism. Taking into consideration the catastrophic consequences of the misinformation and the importance of proper information for the existence of a free and pluralistic society you can understand how urgent it is to limit the spread of fake news. It is up to us to eliminate this phenomenon.
Whistleblowing What is whistleblowing ? Whistleblowing is the act of telling the authorities or the public that the organization has wrongdoings, it could concern these issues for instance: health and safety, damage to the environment, criminal offences or miscarriages of justice. Some people confuse whistleblowing with complaints, in reality whistleblowing has nothing to do with personal grievances like bullying, discrimination or harassment. Whistleblowing is about exposing companies who are not obeying the law. In addition, there are two types of whistleblowing; internal and external whistleblowing. Internal whistleblowing means that the whistle-blower reports the misconduct to a person in the company/organization, external whistleblowing is reporting the wrongdoing to an organization or a person who has nothing to do with the company in question. The name whistleblowing comes from the 19th century as whistle-blowers used a whistle to alert the public or the police. But back then, sport referees, for example, were also called whistle blowers because they use(d) a whistle to denounce a foul play. What are their objectives? As already mentioned, the purpose of whistle-blowers is trying to get rid of unethical behaviour within their workplace. Whistle-blowers act in the public interest, they raise concerns at work. Furthermore, they are not paid to report what they see, usually it’s a person within the company who wants to put things right. After all, their objective is to warn the company of its wrongdoing(s) before anything catastrophic, that could damage the image of the company, happens. Examples The most common whistle-blower cases are about employees reporting corruption, sexual harassment and racial discrimination. Usually whistleblowers act anonymously however there are also known whistle-blowers, with this in mind here are some example cases. The New Yorker, a magazine, declared that 2019 was the year of the whistle-blower as whistleblowing cases increased significantly that year. Danske Bank whistleblower Howard Wilkinson exposed the bank’s Estonia branch to avoid a $230 billion Russian money laundering scheme, Bradley Birkenfeld also reported the Swiss bank whistle-blower who outed American’s secret USB
bank accounts. More importantly, in 2013, an oncologist saved patients from a deadly fraud scheme; he discovered that the patients had been diagnosed with a rare cancer event though they didn’t even have cancer and they received aggressive chemotherapy causing serious injury. The doctor responsible for this fraud was falsely diagnosing patients with cancer and then managed them with expensive chemo sessions. At the end, the doctor was arrested and it then turned out about 500 patients were concerned by the fraud. If the oncologist hadn’t acted, even more patients would have been mistreated! What are the consequences of whistleblowing? Whistleblowing is the controversial subject of many debates: Is a whistleblower considered as a hero or a traitor? In fact, even though the whistleblower has usually good intentions for the benefit of the society, there are a lot of negative consequences to their act. The whistle-blower could lose his job because of the mistrust of the company; if its employee start to become suspicious of the behaviours of the employer, the company will simply fire him or vice-versa: the employee quits the company. And if the employee (the whistle-blower ) does not quit or is not fired, he is usually humiliated at his work place, or other techniques are used. The negative consequences can actually be listed: isolation, humiliation, loss of job, questioning of the whistleblower ’s mental health, tactics to make the whistle-blower ’s work more difficult, … As a matter of fact, whistle-blowers even can suffer during their career because of trust issues; according to a study most of the times, people do not like the whistle-blowers. Although the negative consequences for the whistle-blowers are important, there are also negative aspects for the company in question. Frequently, companies exploit flaws in the systems to make benefits and that’s justified but when the company uses illegal techniques that could damage for example people’s health, there are no excuses: the company will certainly go bankrupt or loose its good image for good (if a whistle-blower acts). However, in the end there are also advantages to the act of reporting as whistle-blowers do for a good cause.
