Yevgeny Prigozhin is a Russian oligarch dubbed "chef" to President Vladimir Putin by the Russian press. In 2002, he served caviar and truffles to President George W. Bush during a summit in St. Petersburg. Before that, he renovated a boat that became the city's most exclusive restaurant.
But his business empire has expanded far beyond the kitchen. US investigators believe it was Prigozhin's company that financed a Russian "troll factory" that used social media to spread fake news during the 2016 US presidential campaign, according to multiple officials briefed on the investigation. One part of the factory had a particularly intriguing name and mission: a "Department of Provocations" dedicated to sowing fake news and social divisions in the West, according to internal company documents obtained by CNN.
Fully explains posters like beltane who comes across about as American as latkes and gulags...
Hmm... would you look at that, Putin's Russia really is at war with the US.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/17/politics/russian-oligarch-putin-chef-troll-factory/index.html
Yevgeny Prigozhin is a Russian oligarch dubbed "chef" to President Vladimir Putin by the Russian press. In 2002, he served caviar and truffles to President George W. Bush during a summit in St. Petersburg. Before that, he renovated a boat that became the city's most exclusive restaurant.
But his business empire has expanded far beyond the kitchen. US investigators believe it was Prigozhin's company that financed a Russian "troll factory" that used social media to spread fake news during the 2016 US presidential campaign, according to multiple officials briefed on the investigation. One part of the factory had a particularly intriguing name and mission: a "Department of Provocations" dedicated to sowing fake news and social divisions in the West, according to internal company documents obtained by CNN.
Fully explains posters like beltane who comes across about as American as latkes and gulags...
Fortunately some newspapers and broadcast news sources have editors who have sense enough to see through a planted story and to check out claims. It’s the right wing ones that don’t have enough sense to do that. They’ll print or broadcast anything that denigrates the opposition. It doesn’t have to be true as long as it’s ugly. There is no shortage of such news sources.
Fortunately some newspapers and broadcast news sources have editors who have sense enough to see through a planted story and to check out claims. It’s the right wing ones that don’t have enough sense to do that. They’ll print or broadcast anything that denigrates the opposition. It doesn’t have to be true as long as it’s ugly. There is no shortage of such nees sources.
The Russians are also targeting social media and sites like this where their trolls drop in like 500 pound bombs and produce as much discord and chaos as they can.
I seem to remember beltane telling you to fuck off because of you're pointing out how corrupt some right winger was... probably trump.
But that was his approach from day one, scorched earth discussion in the Stalin style. Take no prisoners and send any dissenters to the gulag.
Clearly Russia never stopped their end of the Cold War which is why a former member of the USSR terror state is now running all of Russia like his private play thing.
Fortunately some newspapers and broadcast news sources have editors who have sense enough to see through a planted story and to check out claims. It’s the right wing ones that don’t have enough sense to do that. They’ll print or broadcast anything that denigrates the opposition. It doesn’t have to be true as long as it’s ugly. There is no shortage of such nees sources.
The Russians are also targeting social media and sites like this where their trolls drop in like 500 pound bombs and produce as much discord and chaos as they can.
I seem to remember beltane telling you to fuck off because of you're pointing out how corrupt some right winger was... probably trump.
But that was his approach from day one, scorched earth discussion in the Stalin style. Take no prisoners and send any dissenters to the gulag.
Clearly Russia never stopped their end of the Cold War which is why a former member of the USSR terror state is now running all of Russia like his private play thing.
Russians were bound and determined to get a dupe in the White House and their dreams came true more than they could ever have expected. No wonder they worked so hard to defeat Hillary. They knew they wouldn’t be able to pull the wool over her eyes as they could with Trump and his Republican henchmen. They’ve got their mouse in the palm of their hand.
Spamline spamline spamline
Russians were bound and determined to get a dupe in the White House and their dreams came true more than they could ever have expected. No wonder they worked so hard to defeat Hillary. They knew they wouldn’t be able to pull the wool over her eyes as they could with Trump and his Republican henchmen. They’ve got their mouse in the palm of their hand.
Spamline spamline spamline
And none of it would have been possible if the republican party hadn't become the preserve of the loons.
They compete to see who is the most irrational on all sorts of social and scientific issues. Abortion is evil, climate change isn't real, the Earth is just 6,000 years old, cutting all taxes on the wealthy will help everyone and on and on.
It's literally become a party of fools who are willing to accept anything if it feeds their egos. Like trump is an actual president...
The republicans are enabling America's worst enemy and are in fact becoming America's worst enemy because they hate most Americans. They hate liberals, minorities and the poor.
putin and republicans are natural allies in the destruction of America...
Fortunately some newspapers and broadcast news sources have editors who have sense enough to see through a planted story and to check out claims. It’s the right wing ones that don’t have enough sense to do that. They’ll print or broadcast anything that denigrates the opposition. It doesn’t have to be true as long as it’s ugly. There is no shortage of such nees sources.
The Russians are also targeting social media and sites like this where their trolls drop in like 500 pound bombs and produce as much discord and chaos as they can.
I seem to remember beltane telling you to fuck off because of you're pointing out how corrupt some right winger was... probably trump.
But that was his approach from day one, scorched earth discussion in the Stalin style. Take no prisoners and send any dissenters to the gulag.
Clearly Russia never stopped their end of the Cold War which is why a former member of the USSR terror state is now running all of Russia like his private play thing.
The Russians wanted a dupe in the White House and they got him there. It was the best thing they could have done to advance their agenda. They had him figured out from day one. They must have thought they had died and gone to heaven when Trump appeared on the scene. In their wildest dreams they couldn’t have dreamt of such a perfect chump. He fell right into their laps. They probably couldn’t believe their luck.
Russians were bound and determined to get a dupe in the White House and their dreams came true more than they could ever have expected. No wonder they worked so hard to defeat Hillary. They knew they wouldn’t be able to pull the wool over her eyes as they could with Trump and his Republican henchmen. They’ve got their mouse in the palm of their hand.
Spamline spamline spamline
And none of it would have been possible if the republican party hadn't become the preserve of the loons.
They compete to see who is the most irrational on all sorts of social and scientific issues. Abortion is evil, climate change isn't real, the Earth is just 6,000 years old, cutting all taxes on the wealthy will help everyone and on and on.
It's literally become a party of fools who are willing to accept anything if it feeds their egos. Like trump is an actual president...
The republicans are enabling America's worst enemy and are in fact becoming America's worst enemy because they hate most Americans. They hate liberals, minorities and the poor.
putin and republicans are natural allies in the destruction of America...
The tea party set up the Republican party and ruined it.
The tea party set up the Republican party and ruined it.
They did and the Tea Party is just astroturf for the Kochs and big tobacco.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/study-confirms-tea-party-_b_2663125.html
A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.
Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption.
Russia has been waging extensive psychological warfare against the US, Canada, western Europe and other places for years. trump is just the latest and most serious prong of that attack.
The Internet Research Agency (IRA), known in Russian Internet slang as the Trolls from Olgino, is a Russian company, based in Saint Petersburg, that engages in online influence operations on behalf of the Russian government. The agency has employed fake accounts registered on major social networks, discussion boards, online newspaper sites, and video hosting services in order to promote the Kremlin's interests in domestic policy, Ukraine, and the Middle East, as well as attempting to influence the 2016 United States presidential election to support the candidacy of Donald Trump.
The extent to which the Russian government tried to influence public opinion using social media became widely known after a June 2014 BuzzFeed article greatly expanded on government documents published by hackers earlier that year.[2] The IRA gained worldwide media attention by June 2015, when one of its offices was reported as having data from fake accounts used for biased Internet trolling. Subsequently, there were news reports of individuals receiving monetary compensation for performing these tasks.
people get paid to come on sites like this and create as much discord as they can while staunchly touting trump, putin and russia. Sound like anyone here?
Just after 9pm each day, a long line of workers files out of 55 Savushkina Street, a modern four-storey office complex with a small sign outside that reads “Business centre". Having spent 12 hours in the building, the workers are replaced by another large group, who will work through the night.
The nondescript building has been identified as the headquarters of Russia’s “troll army", where hundreds of paid bloggers work round the clock to flood Russian internet forums, social networks and the comments sections of western publications with remarks praising the president, Vladimir Putin, and raging at the depravity and injustice of the west.
Things to look for in an Olgino troll.
They painted a picture of a work environment that was humourless and draconian, with fines for being a few minutes late or not reaching the required number of posts each day. Trolls worked in rooms of about 20 people, each controlled by three editors, who would check posts and impose fines if they found the words had been cut and pasted, or were ideologically deviant.
The LiveJournal blogger, who spent two months working at the centre until mid-March, said she was paid 45,000 roubles (£520, $790) a month, to run a number of accounts on the site. There was no contract - the only document she signed was a non-disclosure form. She was ordered not to tell her friends about the job, nor to add any of them to the social media accounts she would run under pseudonyms.
“We had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing," she said.
They are also required to throw in posts that seem like the are normal people but intersperse them with their attacks.
“We had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing," she said.
Scrolling through one of the LiveJournal accounts she ran, the pattern is clear. There are posts about “Europe’s 20 most beautiful castles" and “signs that show you are dating the wrong girl", interspersed with political posts about Ukraine or suggesting that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is corrupt.
This was limited more to eastern Europe... until putin got trump into office. Then they seemed to have moved west in a big way.
Very, very disgusting and totally in the character of a "leader" that is a former member of the KGB terror state and a pervert who likes to diddle little boys as well.
putin's face to world is some prick with a computer linked to the web spewing crap to make all the rest of us feel like nothing...
Consider yourself lucky that you are not direcly in sphere of interest of Russia, Ukraine did not had that luck but affecting elections is really dangerous game.
In Slovakia the “russian trolls” are very obvious and they dont mask themselves as effectively as in USA. In some discussions they even accidentally drop russian words, instead of slovak. Here they support two official political parties. One is neo-fascists Kotleba, other is pro-russian (forgot the name). Also they support smaller groups with various agenda - usually xenophobes, and isolationists.
Much earlier when they just started to maintain various conspiracy sites, one teacher created first blacklist of propaganda-oriented webpages. Within few weeks trolls created list of their own, but it contained names of people, and the “agenda”. Most of them were “agents of west” or “zionists” and such stuff. One of the names on that list is Miroslav Kocur. Even when the list is referring to a liberal ex-priest (who is actively criticizing Slovak Arch-dioceses for silent support of neo-fascist groups) and not to me, incidentally its my real name as well. So i have decided to get more active against both neo-fascism and russian trolls. There was also one factor - one guy i know went to Ukraine and joined (pro-russian) rebels in Donetsk. (Also its important to note, that such lists should not be created as the law forbids that. We have law which should protect personal information).
Its really not that hard spot their lies. Few days after USA elections, there was a guy claiming “Why are americans protesting against Trump? There were no protests when Obama was elected.” So i used google and linked prostest against Obama… Picture contained and effigy representing Obama and it was being hanged. The troll continued in a manner “but the protests were not that big” … so I posted a screen of big crowd. When he put out third claim i stopped him, told him directly he is a liar and that i already proved that twice.
Its quite easy to do that. Real trolls base their claims on incomplete information, as they tend to have little to no knowledge about location, events or situation they are commenting. Confronting them with facts works.
Vaclav Havel once said that when history repeats itself for the first time, its a tragedy. When repeats for the second time, its a comedy. Czechoslovakia was earlier already subjected to propaganda, and now its the second repeat. Trolls in Slovakia has barely any grasp of reality. Some of them seem to believe that “slavic brothers want to get back to embrace of soviet union”. Except this did not worked back in 1948 when communnists took rule for the first time, it did not worked in 1968 when armies of the Warsaw Pact invated Czechoslovakia. There is lno reason it should work now.
My heart goes out to you, putin wants his empire back and doesn’t care who gets crushed in the conquest.
All of Eastern Europe deserves better even Russia. What’s been done in Ukraine by putin is as disgusting as him raping little boys. He’s raping an entire nation.
Clearly Russia never stopped their end of the Cold War which is why a former member of the USSR terror state is now running all of Russia like his private play thing.
I disagree on this. Gorbatchov was leaned to end of Cold War and he got very close to that, until he was first captured by communist radicals in 1991, but later he lost his influence as Soviet Union effectively dissolved. Jeltsin didnt had aggresive expansionistic politic. I was not much suspicious towards Putin, until Russian consitution was changed and he got reelected as presidend for 3rd term. Later events in Georgia and mainly annexation of Crimea finally convinced me that he is dangerous "KGB goon" as described by Hitchens. There was about decade pause in the Cold War, and current period yet have to earn its new name.
Clearly Russia never stopped their end of the Cold War which is why a former member of the USSR terror state is now running all of Russia like his private play thing.
I disagree on this. Gorbatchov was leaned to end of Cold War and he got very close to that, until he was first captured by communist radicals in 1991, but later he lost his influence as Soviet Union effectively dissolved. Jeltsin didnt had aggresive expansionistic politic. I was not much suspicious towards Putin, until Russian consitution was changed and he got reelected as presidend for 3rd term. Later events in Georgia and mainly annexation of Crimea finally convinced me that he is dangerous "KGB goon" as described by Hitchens. There was about decade pause in the Cold War, and current period yet have to earn its new name.
I mostly agree with that.
The power of the USSR was also in the terror police, from all the different versions up to the KGB which had entire divisions with the latest tanks and weapons to preserve Soviet terror based rule in the USSR.
The terror state may have gone underground for a while, some stayed in the secret police, others went into politics and organized crime which were virtually the same thing in post Soviet Russia. That includes putin who went into politics in Leningrad where he reportedly stole $100 million dollars from a food program.
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2012-04-19/putin-and-the-100-million-deal-that-disappeared
In 1992, Putin was investigated for a deal he oversaw while an official in the mayor’s office. The deal involved the export of $100m worth of raw materials in exchange for food for the citizens of St Petersburg. The materials were exported, but the food never arrived.
The ex-KGB thief should have gone to Russian prison but instead Yeltsin made him his heir to the throne and Russia got apartments blowing up, the second Chechen war and a bloody dictator who murders anybody who stands up to him. Some like Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive poison causing a truly brutal death.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-19647226
Former spy Alexander Litvinenko was killed in November 2006, leading to a clouding of relations between London and Moscow.
The 43-year-old had been an officer with the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, but he fled to Britain where he became a fierce critic of the Kremlin. In his final years he also became a British citizen.
After he was killed by radioactive polonium-210, believed to have been administered in a cup of tea, it emerged the father-of-one was being paid by the British secret service MI6.
There's nothing subtle or just about putin's rule and I think he's to the point of not even trying to hide what a monster he is. About 300 Russians died in the exploding buildings in Russia that was almost certainly the work of the putin controlled FSB in 1999 as a three person FSB team was caught in the act of planting a bomb in a building in Ryazan.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/11/22/finally-we-know-about-moscow-bombings/
If he has that much contempt for his own people in the tradition of Stalin and Ivan the Fearsome then he truly is someone to be opposed with everything we have.
Because all indications are he is now coming for us in the west as he already has his puppet in the White House.
And his online trolls attacking anyone who even questions trump's actions and character.
Then again maybe we shouldn’t feel too bad for many Russians in general if they know what a monster putin is and still support him anyway.
Orekh’s comments were made just ten days before Putin announced that he would be running again for the Russian presidency, instead of the incumbent, Dmitri Medvedev. With Putin now set to remain in power until 2018, and possibly even six years longer, suspicions among Russians about his involvement in the 1999 bombings remain. Dunlop is convinced that the truth about September 1999 will eventually come out, although “that may take a decade or more to occur." But as Sergei Kovalev observed in late 2007, most Russians are indifferent: “I have met people who were convinced that the accusations were true, and yet they voted for Putin with equal conviction. Their logic is simple: genuine rulers wield the kind of power that can do anything, including commit crimes."4 As more than twelve years of investigation, and now Dunlop’s book, have shown, Putin’s guilt seems clear, but it makes no difference.
No, genuine tyrants rule that way, not true leaders. Russia has virtually no experience in justice based civilian government so most Russians probably don't have a clue what real democratic leadership is. Which is why putin has taken over that nation and is now going after control of the US through trump.
So we know that there are thousands of paid trolls working for the Putin government, we likely have some here as they are everywhere on the web.
This give us strong indications of just what the Putin government’s long term objectives are.
Clearly Putin is rebuilding his version of the USSR, he’s put the KGB back together. He’s also been rebuilding the territory the USSR once used to control. Crimea is now back in the hands of Putin after the betrayal of a senior Ukraine military officer in Crimea.
The career of Sergei Yeliseyev helps to explain why Ukraine's armed forces gave up Crimea almost without a fight—and why NATO now says it is alert to Russian attempts to undermine military loyalty in its eastern European members.
His rise to become number two in the Ukrainian navy long before Russia seized Crimea illustrates the divided loyalties that some personnel in countries that once belonged to the Soviet Union might still face.
Yeliseyev's roots were in Russia but he ended up serving Ukraine, a different ex-Soviet republic, only to defect when put to the test. NATO military planners now believe Moscow regards people with similarly ambiguous personal links as potentially valuable, should a new confrontation break out with the West.
In 2014, Yeliseyev was first deputy commander of the Ukrainian fleet, then largely based in Crimea, when Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms took control of Kiev's ships and military bases on the peninsula.
Instead of resisting, Yeliseyev quit and subsequently got a new job: deputy chief of Russia's Baltic Fleet.
Yeliseyev, now aged 55, did not respond to Reuters questions sent to him via the Russian defense ministry.
Putin has thousands of personnel at war in Eastern Ukraine.
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-11-24/russia-has-deployed-thousands-of-tanks-troops-to-ukraine-top-official-says
The Russian government has deployed thousands of armored vehicles and troops into Ukraine to support separatist rebels in the war-torn country's eastern region, Ukraine's top defense official says, despite repeated assertions from Moscow of minimal military involvement there.
"It's a real army. They have continuous inflow of munitions," Pavlo Klimkin, the Ukrainian defense minister, told a small group of reporters on the sidelines of an international security conference here last weekend.
Klimkin says 2,000 Russian armed vehicles and "a couple thousand" Russian soldiers are operating in the contested Donetsk and Luhansk provinces of eastern Ukraine, known collectively as the Donbas. A simmering proxy war has taken place there since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists began fighting to break the rural provinces away from Kiev. In addition, Russia has deployed artillery, mortars, light weapons and missile systems, like the Sa-11 that reportedly shot down a Malaysian airliner in 2015.
And all the other nations in Eastern Europe that are now under threat from the aggressively expansionist Kremlin under Putin.
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/forums/viewthread/19795/
And what are the likely Olgino trolls here saying.
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/forums/viewthread/19786/
An excellent proposal, hopefully it will happen soon.
And we shouldnt stop until every American base in Northern Europe is closed.
Basically, step aside and give Russia back control of all Eastern Europe. As we saw with Crimea and as we are still seeing with Ukraine, where there is ANY power vacuum in that region then Putin will exploit it often violently.
Why would Russian saboteurs target a barely-used atheist forum like CFI
No, why would anyone be on here if they have utter contempt for the other people who make up the forum.
Simply to troll them.
For one thing atheists tend to be far more skilled in critical thinking and resistant to the kind of thought control involved with something like the Kremlin having thousands of paid trolls prowl the web seeking to prevent any discussion that may lead to a coordinated opposition to them.
It's why they pay these intentional assholes.
They come onto a forum like this and immediately begin to troll and attack anyone who holds an opinion that runs counter to their agenda.
Beltane showed up right after trump was elected. The first interaction I had with it - it's not a real person, it's the product of a troll factory - was being told by it that I was deranged for thinking that trump colluded with the Russian government to get elected.
And then started an entire thread to take that discussion in a totally pointless direction.
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/forums/viewthread/19323/
Good point, and that little piece of American history pales in comparison to the mayhem-inducing imperialist policies FDR favored.
Where apparently the leader of the isolationist US government was a nefarious imperialist... even though at the time the US had an army smaller than "mighty" Portugal and a tiny fraction of the armed forces of the nation this BS is almost certainly coming from. The USSR where Stalin already had millions of men under arms and almost 20 million trained reserves. It's why when the Nazis invaded and they destroyed red army after red army Stalin merely created another one to use as cannon fodder.
The same shit is going on now, the US is the aggressive nation but Russia under Putin is peace loving and no threat to anyone.
even though it keeps attacking its neighbours and engaging in things like the cyber attack on the US that has put one of the most socially destructive presidents in US power in office.
And still has thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at us and will add even more fierce weapons this year with the RS-28 and S-500.
But according to this Putin troll that is pure paranoia to even talk about this stuff.
I don’t know what your problem is, but don’t mess up my thread with your stupid cold war paranoia.
My problem is, I'm not willing to allow my freedom and possibly my life to be destroyed by the scum of the earth that is represented by those in power now in Russia and those who they hire to prowl the web to propagate their disease.
Once trump is gone then the motive for this kind of attack here will largely be gone, this is just more of the smokescreen that is being thrown up around the russian backed traitor on the US throne.
Guess who is right at the top of the list of companies being charged by the FBI for attacking the US through the internet?
You got, the Internet Research Agency LLC
INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY LLC
And considering we're likely being ratfucked here by people from the same agency who showed up right after the Russian backed trump took office, how about a little action here to stop posters from trolling this site in the interests of the Russian(Putin) government and against the interests of pretty well everyone else in the civilized world.