The sad life of Putin’s “Troll Army”
Defectors from an internet comment factory employing about 250 people, many of whom, surprisingly, turned out to be not brainwashed propagandists, but ordinary people in search of money.-@EuromaidanPress 2014 euromaidanpress.com/2014/11/02/the…
Defectors from an internet comment factory employing about 250 people, many of whom, surprisingly, turned out to be not brainwashed propagandists, but ordinary people in search of money.-@EuromaidanPress 2014 euromaidanpress.com/2014/11/02/the…
Around 250 people work 12-hour shifts, writing in blogs 24/7..This is a full-cycle production: some write the posts, others comment on them. Most often they comment each other in order to boost the ratings.—@EuromaidanPress 2014
By the way, they don’t tell you what you will be doing until you start. They tell you you’ll be writing in a blog, like a housewife but in an office. Yeah, a housewife wakes up and starts writing about Ukraine, right.—@EuromaidanPress 2014
We worked 12-hour shifts for two days with two days off. A blogger’s quota is 10 posts a day, 750 characters each, a commenter has to write 126 comments and two posts. A blogger has three accounts to manage. You have to distribute the 10 assignments between them.—@EuromaidanPress
A commenter’s main task is to stir things up.—@EuromaidanPress 2014
Some political scientist came –He talked a lot about his success at elections. Then about Putin’s glorious policies: who else but him, that kind of stuff. But why is it so bad locally? Well, don’t mind that, Putin is still great. And he kept hammering it in.-@EuromaidanPress 2014
Some time later I stopped having hostile reactions – or any reactions; I just had to sit through the lecture.—@EuromaidanPress 2014
Mostly people come not because they love Putin but because they have nowhere else to work. One room is occupied by retirees. They have nowhere else to work. That’s a good indicator of Putin’s Russia: the pension is small and you have nothing left to do but get paid to love Putin.
The direct management had never touched politics. There was a funny guy, Oleg. Imagine—a man with a huge beer gut, in an untucked denim shirt, walks around, dangles car keys on his finger like a taxi driver and tells you: “If a man can write, he’ll write about anything”.—EMP ‘14
The teamleader was a 20-year old girl who’d never worked in the media..she dropped out of university. Now she is an important boss..Inside the company there is growth. There was a guy who spewed 20 posts a day. Now he wears a tie and writes instructions how to spew 20 posts a day
The general impression? Disgust. The salary was tempting, I’ll give them that. We aren’t unique here. You can fight the disgust for a long time. People live like that for years. They curse their hated jobs but still go there in the morning. But we couldn’t take that anymore.—EMP
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