2. Twitter and Facebook have (reluctantly) revealed the accounts they know were paid for by the Internet Research Agency, Olgino, Petersburg. But we can expect there to be many more
3. There are reported to be several troll farms in Russia. There are also reports of paid trolls in Romania and Bulgaria. And of course there are countless fake news sites in the US and UK. But how are they paid for?
4. One covert and very effective way of paying propagandists is through click bait ad traffic, multiplied many times by the various botnets that used to be under indirect Kremlin control.
5. Until recently, ad revenue systems didn't distinguish between fake robotic traffic and human eyes, so powering up a botnet to support some spurious blog filled with anti Obama/Clinton conspiracy theories could transfer mounds of cash.
6. Fake news sites in the US were raking in $100k a year through ad traffic until botnets were attacked. A great incentive to spread propaganda.
7. But one has to wonder if this practice spread much further, to main stream media sites. We know that 100s of media organisation inadvertently helped spread the message of Olgino trolls and bots. But that is just the beginning
8. Comment sections like the Daily Mail (and presumably Guido Fawkes even more) were infested by Olgino trolls whipping up racism and division during #Brexit. This helped harvest £££££s for those sites.
9. For legitimate sites, this was tolerated because of the cash revenues. For Putin allied propaganda sites, this was the main source of revenue. So - like a mirror trade - the Russian botnets could transfer vast amounts of cash covertly to campaigns
10. It needs more research, but one factor in the recent crash of online advertising revenue (Daily Mail shares dropped 25% last week because of it) could be the closure of the Russian controlled botnets in the wake of IC and FBI actions
