<story><title>The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>meesterdude</author><text>&amp;gt; Volodin installed in his office a custom-designed computer terminal loaded with a system called Prism, which monitored public sentiment online using 60 million sources&lt;p&gt;Oh look, they&amp;#x27;ve got prism too!&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; According to the website of its manufacturer, Prism “actively tracks the social media activities that result in increased social tension, disorderly conduct, protest sentiments and extremism.”&lt;p&gt;Well that&amp;#x27;s comforting.&lt;p&gt;This is obviously still in it&amp;#x27;s infancy, but they&amp;#x27;re only going to get better at this. Obvious leads and dead giveaways will be replaced with more subtly and variance, and detecting whats bullshit and whats real will become even more difficult, if not impossible.&lt;p&gt;This is russia&amp;#x27;s answer to people rioting over corruption in the government. Not transparency, not change; social manipulation of information and spreading lies.&lt;p&gt;And they aren&amp;#x27;t the only ones doing this. They&amp;#x27;re just the only ones we know about. No doubt other countries, companies and criminal organizations are operating similar tactics already.&lt;p&gt;Certainly puts a new spin on the term &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t talk to strangers&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>The Agency: An army of well-paid “trolls” in St. Petersburg</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gyardley</author><text>Poorly titled and therefore hard to share on Hacker News, but lengthy and worth reading investigative reporting into a bizarre &amp;#x27;Internet Research Agency&amp;#x27; that mainly produces pro-Putin propaganda, in both English and Russian.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m surprised, frankly, that they don&amp;#x27;t have better English-language proficiency.</text></comment>