HYBRID WAR. West vs Russia: Information Font Summary
The English press has found on Twitter a chekist troll posing as a supporter of the Independence Party (UKIP) and a British subject.
The Chekist is engaged in pro-Kremlin propaganda on the social network. Analysis of tweets, published under the name @ DavidJo52951945, showed that they are being placed as part of a disinformation campaign (an element of a hybrid war), The Times reports. After exposing the account of the KGB troll was transferred to private mode.
David Jones's account scored more than 100,000 subscribers, among them prominent British rightists, and his publications are regularly retweeted by members of the UKIP UK party with thousands of subscribers. Since 2013, this account has distributed 130 thousand tweets against the EU, against migration and in support of Brexit, the article says.
Journalists, after analyzing recent tweets, found that almost all of them are located between 5 and 17 hours, British time, that is, between 8 and 20 hours, Moscow time. In this regard, the newspaper reminds of a scandal with the "trolley factory" in St. Petersburg, where the hired agents are working 12-hour shifts.
In particular, British journalists drew attention to the fact that at strategic points David Jones promoted Kremlin theses - for example, he doubted that Russia was involved in the crash of the passenger plane MH17 in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and criticized Turkey when the Air Force countries shot down a Russian fighter in 2015.
Attention of Internet users was attracted by the nature and frequency of the appearance of Jones' posts in the social network, as well as the extent to which they are consistent with Russia's hopes, another article in The Times says. A curious trend - the appearance of tweets in Moscow office hours - was discovered by an American data researcher who had doubts about this account.
Tweets are published every few minutes seven days a week, which may indicate that the account is a project that assumes full employment for people working in shifts. The analysis also revealed that Jones's profile appears to be part of a network of thousands of accounts with similar names, many of which promoted the themes of the Kremlin agenda.
Kir Chiles, an expert on the Russian information war at the London-based think tank Chatham House, said that the excellent command of English and the complexity of the topics involved make this account "one of the most sophisticated" among the pro-Kremlin projects on social networks.
On the one hand, the work of the troll from 8 to 20 in Moscow gives rise to jokes, writes The Times in the third article, stating that "perhaps this is a serious argument for the Kremlin to introduce flexible working hours." On the other hand, the newspaper’s editorial board warns against a frivolous reaction to this disclosure, recalling that chaos reigns in social networks, creating fertile ground for disinformation.
Russian trolls acting in the English-language segment of the Network are often associated with KGB channels of Russian propaganda, such as Russia Today and Sputnik. "Their strategy does not necessarily directly involve changing the opinions of individual people. By creating noise and repeating the same thing, they pursue the goal of changing and destabilizing the field of debate," the article says.
About the "factory of trolls," which is mentioned in the article The Times, first became known in 2013. Since then, the media, including foreign ones, have repeatedly reported on the work of the troll headquarters. In particular, the British newspaper The Guardian, which complained about trolling in the comments, communicated with the employees of the "trolley factory".
The correspondent of The New York Times two years ago opened a network of Chekist trolls from Russia who write about non-existent catastrophes in the United States, and accused them of provocations.
The Washington Post journalists also wrote about the traces of the Chekist trolls that they found in the comments on the publications in the New York Times, CNN and The Huffington Post. The publication indicated that they were financed by a company associated with the Kremlin.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
Kavkaz Center
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