[PLEASE NOTE: The Russian troll army is being asked to downvote this as we speak. If you're Russian, please understand I don't work for the US Government. I'm just a normal American citizen who was fooled by your propaganda and thought our government was corrupt. But as I dug deeper, I was deeply saddened by how much trash there is now in my favorite online forums. Reddit, being one of them. I've been using Reddit since fall of 2005, and it's never been this bad until now.]

Putin is running a huge propaganda campaign, manipulating our social media to influence U.S. election and politics.

Putin’s simultaneously feeding racism to the right, and social outrage to the left. He’s not pro-Trump. He’s pro-division. And he’s winning.

What’s also disturbing is that, when it comes to online political discussions, we cannot trust Twitter tweets, Youtube content/comments, Reddit content/comments/upvotes, most non-mainstream news websites, or even Google search results. Everywhere, Russian propaganda is pushed to the top of search engines using SEO and social media using bot votes.

Problem

A majority of U.S. adults — 62% — get news on social media, and 18% do so often. (Source)

• 66% of FB users consume news found on FB
• 70% of Reddit users consume news found on Reddit

Russia has hijacked all American social media channels — including Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Youtube, and Google Search — to post propaganda.

USA has not fought back very hard because we’re a democracy, and censorship is a dark road to go down.

Google

If you search “putin soros” on Google, this is literally the top result: http://yournewswire.com/vladimir-putin-george-soros-is-wanted-dead-or-alive/

How did a Russian site get #1 rank on Google for keywords that an American citizen might enter for political research?

The website is full of pro-Russian stances, written all in English: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ayournewswire.com+propaganda

• Russia Put Black Lives Matter On Official ‘Terror List’
• Soros Launches ‘Putin-Trump’ Fake Conspiracy
• Americans Bombarded With As Much Propaganda As North Koreans
• Former Clinton Associate Exposes Fake News Agenda
• Buzzfeed Normalize Human Microchips In Disturbing Propaganda Video

This site’s propaganda is all over Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=yournewswire.com&src=typd

• It’s all over Facebook (try searching the domain name on FB)
• This blogger digs in, and complains about it, but no one will hear this type of cautionary message: https://toinformistoinfluence.com/2015/11/08/russian-proxy-news-site-exposed-yournewswire/
• Registered in 2014, the website’s traffic is growing fast: https://www.similarweb.com/website/yournewswire.com

These are high volume pageviews, literally feeding us Russian propaganda, and we’re sharing it in our social media, with each other. And we start thinking these ideas are organically from Americans.

Russia Today (rt.com)

Russia Today (rt.com), a Kremlin-controlled news agency, is at the heart of this.

Underlying the growing tensions between Russia and the West is an imbalance of power. Moscow’s sense that it is being humiliated by the Americans and Europeans, rather than being taken seriously, has led it to adopt an aggressive, defensive attitude. In order to protect itself against what it perceives as pressure from the West and to respond with its own means, the Kremlin resolved to undertake an active soft power campaign. It has waged this with renewed intensity since the beginning the Ukraine crisis and continues to expand its reach. The establishment of the international news agency Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) at the end of 2013 was a milestone on the path to this reconfiguration. The communication strategy developed by Moscow not only serves to convince the Russian population of Western “aggressiveness” and to persuade citizens to support Vladimir Putin and his policies. It is also intended to have an impact abroad — to “influence public opinion in other countries with targeted disinformation.”

RT.com is Alexa-ranked #320 of all websites in the world.

It is the primary website amongst many others in a propaganda network.

RT.com / Russia Today (not including the other sites in the network)

• most popular “news network” on Youtube, with over 4 billion views
• reaches 700 million people, or over 25% of all cable subscribers worldwide
• available to more than 86 million cable subscribers in the United States alone, as of 2012
• 120M monthly visits — that’s 10% the traffic of Reddit

20M monthly visits, directly linked from Facebook

• 71% of its social media referrals (22% of all traffic) is coming directly from Facebook
• 13% from Twitter
• 6% from Reddit
• 6% from vk.com (Russian Facebook clone)

Only 18% of its traffic comes from Russia

• 17% comes from USA
• 5% from UK
• 5% from Germany
• 4% from Mexico

Facebook

Fake news is a problem on Facebook:

• 38% of hyper-right-wing Facebook posts contain fake news
• 19% of hyper-left-wing Facebook posts contain fake news

This feeds into the echo chamber of our personalized news feeds.

During the election, Facebook withheld an algorithm fix for this, because of fear it might incite rage: http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204

Facebook & Google are now fighting back with policies against fake news: http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-bans-fake-news-sites-from-using-its-advertising-network-1479175778

58% of Trump’s Facebook followers appear to be foreign, bots, or purchased: http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-facebook-followers-2015-6

Ukraine is begging FB to tame Russian propaganda against Ukraine: http://www.fudzilla.com/news/35637-ukraine-tells-facebook-ceo-to-tame-russian-bots

Reddit

Reddit is website #25 on Alexa. 1.20B monthly visits (11 minutes / 10 page views per session) from primarily:

• 45% US
• 8% UK
• 6% Canada
• 3% Australia

At the time of this writing, top 2 of 10 posts on r/all are from r/The_Donald, the Russian brigade.

America created Reddit, then Russia hijacked it. Great strategy: free 1.2B monthly visits for RT.com

This is so frustrating, because Reddit’s my favorite website and r/all was like my own home. Here’s a screenshot of /r/all’s rising: http://i.imgur.com/F5vfK68.png

Literally 80% of the “rising” posts were from /r/The_Donald

Another example: http://i.imgur.com/CHju0ll.png

Notice the r/Sorosforprison post that’s in r/all’s rising, it had a score of 395 points, yet the subreddit had only 47 subscribers.

Makes sense. Soros and Putin interests are not aligned. According to this Russian propaganda site, Putin wants him “dead or alive”: http://yournewswire.com/vladimir-putin-george-soros-is-wanted-dead-or-alive/

Reddit founder /u/spez tried to counteract this by normalizing scores, on a per-sub-reddit basis, so no single sub-reddit could spam with bot votes (announcement & discussion)

• They immediately countered by creating multiple subreddits
• It was very easy to identify these subreddits (e.g., r/WayOfTheBern), which popped up immediately after /u/spez’s algorithm change. Despite being new with few subscribers, every post got thousands of bot upvotes.
• Bernie Sanders’ own subreddit never promoted much Trump content, suggesting these sub-reddits were a direct result of the propaganda machine.

A good way to identify Russian-dominated sub-reddits is search by domain “rt.com”: https://www.reddit.com/domain/rt.com/

These subreddits came up: r/The_Donald, r/GreenParty, r/WayOfTheBern, r/texas, r/conspiracy, r/podemos (Spanish sub), r/worldpolitics, r/WikiLeaks, r/DNCleaks, r/TheNewRight, r/Libertarian, r/NeverHillary, r/POLITIC, r/uncensorednews, r/EndlessWar, r/altright, r/ChristiansAwake2NWO, r/governmentoppression, r/worldtoday, r/Soros, r/Sorosforprison, r/obamascontroversies, r/Political_Revolution, r/1984isreality, r/badgovnofreedom, r/ConspiracyFacts, r/SargonofAkkad, r/ronpaul, r/WhiteRights, r/collapse, r/WesternTerrorism, r/AmericanPolitics, r/Intelligence, r/uspolitics, r/paleoconservative, r/IslamUnveiled, r/Free_Assange, r/wikidecentralized, r/The_Europe, r/altnewz, r/cults, r/HillaryForPrison

They’ve even entered subreddits like r/SandersForPresident. Example posts:

• "Media and Clinton Camp Quickly Try To Distract People from the Content of the DNC Leak by Blaming it on a Russian Conspiracy."
• "This is why Bernie keeps talking about working with the Russians. Super important, as it shows Hillary’s disingenuous flouting of foreign policy effectiveness, and how messed up the media situation is."

In 2013, RT.com was banned from r/news for spamming (was dominating the sub with 10% of the submissions): http://www.dailydot.com/news/rt-russia-today-banned-reddit-r-news/

Discussion on r/The_Donald botting: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/58xhlx/how_russias_twitter_bots_and_trolls_work_with/

Instagram

375K Russian bots promoting Trump: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/11/07/25000-russians-follow-trump-instagram-bots-everywhere/#f6314637128c

Twitter

During 2nd debate, 900K Russian bot tweets, compared to 200K HRC/CTR bot tweets. There’s two categories of bots

• Alt-right trolls
• Russian bot accounts pretending to be patriotic Americans

Ironically, most Trump supporters aren’t even on Twitter.

Tricking the Twitter trending algo:

Let’s say you had a hashtag you wanted to get trending. You have a thousand bots (or Russian Trolls) and a popular account like Ricky Vaughn. You have the bots start using the hashtag, they start flooding twitter until it gets a high count (but not in the top 20 trends) then have a real person, Ricky Vaughn, start pitching the hashtag to his followers. Here is where the window of timing kicks in: within minutes, Ricky Vaughn can have something trending, but before he gets the hashtag to the top 15 you have almost all of the bots automatically delete their tweets with the hashtags. You‘ve now started “a trend” quickly and have had it associated with “Ricky Vaughn” and not a 1,000 odd bots or Russian trolls.*

WikiLeaks politically aligned with Russia

A friend who contracts with the White House on cybersecurity told me that the DNC hacks were done by Russians. But due to political reasons (since we also hack Russia regularly), US Government can’t accuse them officially.

Hillary’s offhanded conspiracy-sounding comment about Russian hacking was true: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2016/0615/Meet-Fancy-Bear-and-Cozy-Bear-Russian-groups-blamed-for-DNC-hack

• The hackers who spent at least a year lurking inside the Democratic National Committee’s computers don’t appear to be just any cybercriminals. They’re suspected in a number of high-profile attacks against the US and other Western countries going back almost a decade. Researchers first detected Cozy Bear in the mid-2000s and Fancy Bear in 2010.
• “With Fancy Bear we have medium level confidence it’s GRU, which is Russia’s military intelligence agency, and with Cozy Bear we have low level confidence it’s FSB, the Russian federal security service.”
• “We, too, practice cyberespionage and … we’re not bad at it. I think it’s a good idea to at least think about the old saw about people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks,” said Clapper, stressing the need to draw greater distinctions when it comes to the types of cyber threats.
• Intel chiefs draw distinction between digital espionage and malicious hacks

Assange seems to be inappropriately aligned with Russia:

• Assange has held interviews on Russia Today.
• He has not released anything on Russia, despite their bombing of Syria.
• He asked: Why criticize Russia, a “bit player on the world stage,” compared with countries like China and the United States?
• “Every man and his dog is criticizing Russia,” Assange said. “It’s a bit boring, isn’t it?”

There was an attempt by John Kerry & CIA to get Assange to cooperate. John Kerry asked Ecuador to cut his internet. CIA gave veiled threats of imprisonment and tried to smear him with child molestation via a front company.

I read tons of DNC/Podesta emails from Wikileaks. Yes, U.S. media (New York Times and others) is pro U.S. establishment, and is a propaganda machine. Yes, there was unfairness at the DNC towards Bernie. Yes, Hillary makes money off her political standing. But their biggest sin is that they’re very bureaucratic and ineffective. The cronyism isn’t actually criminal.

In politics, “trading favors” is a standard practice. No man rules alone. You must deal with power structures, or you will not accomplish anything. Trump may be more independent than HRC, but he is already resorting to these practices, and it’s pretty normal stuff: Trump’s Potential Cabinet Fills Out With Washington Insiders

The propaganda around Wikileaks encourages distrusting DNC, Podesta, and Hillary. These are patriotic leaders who on balance are trying to help our country, even if we disagree with their policies or their bureaucracy. It’s our right to vote them out, but it’s also important to understand that Russia is manipulating our opinion for doing so through propaganda.

Silicon Valley insiders to the rescue

Reddit, Facebook, Buzzfeed, and Twitter founders all supported HRC.

These guys are all clued into US government & intelligence. Buzzfeed helped with a smear campaign against Assange for example.

Always the contrarian, Peter Thiel is one of the few SV leaders who supports Trump. As chairman of Palantir, he jokes: “Is Palantir a front for the CIA? No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.”

Here’s the Palantir dossier to the CIA against Wikileaks, ironically released by Wikileaks: https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf

By the way, given most of these insiders are good people, and most of them support Hillary Clinton, it makes me think HRC is not actually corrupt, but a patriot. Given Peter Thiel basically is in the CIA and supports Trump, Donald Trump is probably also a patriot.

Our politicians are not that bad.

Russian global strategy

Putin’s goals:

• exploit disunity in order to undermine NATO
• block US missile defense programs
• revoke economic sanctions imposed after the annexation of Crimea

Putin’s strategy (source):

1. Recognize that a segment of people in Western Societies are unhappy because they’ve lost status as a result of globalization and neoliberal economic policy. Despite overall global inequality decreasing, intra-national inequality has increased.
2. Promote/fund right-wing/nationalist populist groups in Western countries that feed off of this unhappiness.
3. Watch as nationalistic, anti-neoliberal populism leads to dysfunction of teamwork between Western countries. (Brexit, breaking up the EU, making the USA non-interventionist.)
4. Take advantage of this power vacuum to expand Russian interests in former USSR states (Georgia, Ukraine, Estonia, Poland, Moldova, etc.).

It’s working globally…

USA: http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-election/dnc-leak-russia-better-at-information-war-now-than-during-cold-war-20160725-gqdotv.html

• Distributing DNC emails on social media amplifies hard feelings over Bernie Sanders’ loss to Hillary Clinton. It creates stress division, confusion and cynicism among Democrats and Americans
• everything from Twitter bots to pump up the popularity of news, to trolls based everywhere, to slickly produced conspiracy theories blended with real analysis
• “I think the Russians have picked up that across the West there is a widespread apathy amongst voters and mistrust of politics and government,” said Matthew Sussex of ANU’s National Security College, who studies Russian foreign and security policy. “Anything you can do to increase that distrust serves Russian interests.”
• using leaked information posted online to terrorise politicians.
• Despite all of this subversive activity, democracies’ defenses against information war are weak. Democracies aren’t in the business of telling their citizens what to think. The Internet allows propaganda to directly reach citizens, making it harder for mainstream media to debunk false stories.

Europe

• anti-immigrant far-right parties chip away at the consensus that holds the European Union together
• the migrant crisis issue which agitates them, receive top billing on Russia-owned media broadcasting in those European languages
• http://imrussia.org/en/analysis/world/2500-putinism-and-the-european-far-right
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/12103602/America-to-investigate-Russian-meddling-in-EU.html
• Russian influence operations running in France, Netherlands, Hungary, Austria, and the Czech Republic, which has been identified by Russian agents as an entry-point into the Schengen free movement zone

UK

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/08/russia-europe-right-putin-front-national-eu
• Senior British government officials told The Telegraph of growing fears that “a new cold war” was now unfolding in Europe, with Russian meddling taking on a breadth, range and depth far greater than previously thought.
• misinformation surrounding the campaign for Britain to leave the EU

Germany

• http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/putin-wages-hybrid-war-on-germany-and-west-a-1075483.html
• The brief disappearance of a girl in Germany recently become an international political issue. Russia is exploiting the case for propaganda purposes as part of its strategy of a hybrid war aimed at destabilizing the West and dividing Europe

Sweden

• http://www.thelocal.se/20160727/concern-over-barrage-of-fake-russian-news-in-sweden
• False information about subjects including NATO, immigration, and terrorism, is spread on a daily basis in Sweden, Mikael Tofvesson of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) told Swedish radio on Wednesday spread pro-Russian messages and to exacerbate worries and create splits in society

Australia

• http://www.smh.com.au/world/who-controls-our-news-welcome-to-the-era-of-russian-and-chinese-information-war-20160907-grapkr.html
• repackaging of news to confuse the public: “Nazis run the Ukrainian government”
• increase in conspiracy theories: “Hillary Clinton is dying of a grave illness”
• information war tactics have “corrosive power on a population’s ability to discern false information from true information and to discern what might be morally wrong from morally right”, says Professor Greg Austin at the UNSW

Ukraine & Crimea

• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/17/crimea-crisis-russia-propaganda-media
• occupation of Crimea by pro-Russian forces has been accompanied by a remarkable propaganda push by Moscow

Bulgaria

• http://www.politico.eu/article/tsetska-tsacheva-rumen-radev-first-round-romania/
• pro-Russian candidate just beat out Prime Minister Boyko Borisov’s nominee in first round presidential election in Bulgaria

France

• http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/18/the-inevitable-putin-le-pen-alliance-is-so-on.html
• Party led by former French President Nicolas Sarkozy now aligning with Moscow
• Marine le Pen’s National Front has received a $11.7 million loan from a Russian bank, as an apparent reward for her far-right party’s support of Russian stances in the Ukrainian conflict
• Putin has won over French conservatives
• http://uacrisis.org/14701-french-activists-discuss-impact-russian-propaganda-france
• Anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian articles in journals and news sources
• Propaganda against Euromaidan movement (a democratic movement Putin openly doesn’t like) as a fascist coup aided and abetted by the United States
• The French activists believe that general ignorance among the population about their own history is in part responsible for the effectiveness of Russian lobbying in the country.
• General wariness of the United States’ influence makes Putinism at least marginally popular to many in France.
• https://dgap.org/en/think-tank/publications/dgapanalyse-compact/french-susceptibility-russian-propaganda

How the sausage is made

Adrian Chen did some investigative journalism and met these guys in person: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html

Russia’s tactical goals with propaganda:

• Try to confuse the audience, rather than convince it.
• They cannot censor information, so they try to trash the digital channels of political discussion with conspiracy theories and rumors.

How troll armies work on the inside: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

• The e-mails indicated that members of the “brigades” were paid 85 rubles (about 3 US dollars) or more per comment, depending on whether the comment received replies.
• Some were paid as much as 600,000 roubles (about US $21,000) for leaving hundreds of comments on negative press articles on the internet, and were presented with iPads.
• 22 of 60 countries examined have been using paid pro-government commentators to manipulate online discussions
• St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency, which employs at least 400 people in 2013. hired young people as “Internet operators” paid to write pro-Kremlin postings and comments, smearing opposition leader Alexei Navalny and U.S. politics and culture
• Each commenter was to write no less than 100 comments a day, while people in the other room were to write four postings a day, which then went to the other employees whose job was to post them on social networks as widely as possible.
• such practices create a chilling effect on the few independent media outlets that remain in the country
• One Twitter bot network was documented to use more than 20,500 fake Twitter accounts to spam negative comments after the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and events related to the war in Donbass
• commentators sometimes leave hundreds of postings a day
• To avert suspicions, the users sandwich political remarks between neutral articles on traveling, cooking and pets.
• Overwhelm comment sections of media to render meaningful dialogue impossible. The effect created by such Internet trolls is not very big, but they manage to make certain forums meaningless because people stop commenting on the articles when these trolls sit there and constantly create an aggressive, hostile atmosphere toward those whom they don’t like. The trolls react to certain news with torrents of mud and abuse. This makes it meaningless for a reasonable person to comment on anything there.

Leaked files exposed “troll den” was strictly regulated by guidelines:

• Any blog post written by an agency employee must contain “no fewer than 700 characters” during day shifts and “no fewer than 1,000 characters” on night shifts.
• Use of graphics and keywords in the post’s body and headline is also mandatory.
• Bloggers are also provided with “technical tasks” — keywords and talking points on specific issues, such as Ukraine, Russia’s internal opposition and relations with the West.
• On an average working day, the workers are to post on news articles 50 times.
• Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day.
• By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day.
• On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.

In 2015 Lawrence Alexander disclosed a network of propaganda websites sharing the same Google Analytics identifier and domain registration details, allegedly run by Nikita Podgorny from Internet Research Agency

• websites were mostly meme repositories focused on attacking Ukraine, Euromaidan, Russian opposition and Western policies
• websites from this cluster promoted president Putin and Russian nationalism
• spread alleged news from Syria presenting anti-Western viewpoints

List of Russian websites in America

Just a small list of Russian propaganda sites listed on this blog: https://toinformistoinfluence.com/2015/11/15/russian-news-and-russian-proxy-news-sites/

If you search on Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, articles from these domains are posted everywhere, and many Americans are sharing them, thinking it’s organic news.

• 21st Century Wire — Started in 2009.
• AmericanTerrorist
• British Helsinki Human Rights Group
• Conte
• Consortiumnews
• Daily World News — Notice the URL, http://visitwinchestervirginia.com, but it has nothing to do with Winchester, Virginia, whatsoever.
• Darussophile
• GlobalResearch aka Centre for Research on Globalization (GlobalResearch.ca and GlobalResearch.org)
• Informationclearinghouse.info
• Institute for Democracy and Cooperation (Russian language)
• IntrepidReport — Fearless, Feisty and Independent News, Commentary and Analysis. They’re so good the “About Us” is blank.
• KateHon
• La Russophobe — US-based popular Russia blog recording the rise of the Neo-Soviet Union. Last publication 2014.
• Liefdenetwerk nl
• Media Lens
• Military informant — Information Agency (in Russian) –
• New World Order Opposition
• OpEdNews “Progressive, Liberal”
• OffGuardian
• OrientalReview.org
• Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
• Russia Insider: The mission of this site is media criticism and reform, run by Western expats providing “alternative” news
• Serendipity: This website is based on a libertarian (in the sense of S.Mill) perspective and is opposed to Fascism, Capitalism, Zionism, the Anglo-Zionist Empire, the Surveillance State and all who secretly work to cause wars for their own advantage and profit
• SocialFeed.info
• SouthFront
• Sputniknews.com
• Strategic-culture.org — Strategic Culture Foundation Publishes a lot of articles about Russia but “Russia” is not on a list of ‘tags’. Funny thing…
• The Duran
• The Impious Digest
• Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research
• Veteransnewsnow
• VeteransToday
• Vineyardsaker.blogspot
• YourNewsWire — News. Truth. Unfiltered. Mostly completely fabricated junk.
• Washingtonsblog
• What Does It Mean
• World Socialist Web Site
• Zerohedge.com

Collaborating with right-wing U.S. politician Ron Paul

Try googling “Ron Paul”. You get 3 Russian propaganda sites:

• ronpaulinstitute.org is #3 after Wikipedia article and Twitter: Every single article about Russia is pro-Russia: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Aronpaulinstitute.org+Russia
• ronpaullibertyreport.com is #4: “NATO has been obsolete for a long time”
• ronpaul.com is #5: Special section just for Russia Today articles: http://www.ronpaul.com/tag/russia-today/

Despite all the Russian propaganda on his site, ronpaulinstitute.org is listed as Ron Paul’s official website on both his Twitter and Facebook. The site is labeled a Russian propaganda site in the above list. This former US Congressman is now distributing Russian propaganda through his personal website.

Hiring left-wing American media personalities

In addition to co-opting the American right-wing, it is also co-opting the left-wing, by literally hiring them for Russia Today.

Ed Schultz is a left-wing former MSNBC personality. Many saw him as the liberal answer to Rush Limbaugh. The progressive talk radio host has landed at Russia Today, the Kremlin-backed cable news channel.

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/14/media/ed-schultz-rt-america/

Promoting left-wing Occupy Wall Street

This is Russia Today covering the protest: https://www.rt.com/news/324697-rt10-occupy-wall-street/

The Kremlin isn’t liberal or conservative. It’s just trying to:

• create division between liberals and conservatives
• make Americans distrust their government & media

ZeroHedge, an American finance blog

ZeroHedge.com is a financial blog that gets 46M monthly visits, with visitors primarily from US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Germany.

It has been outed as a Russian propaganda platform:

• Founded by Daniel Ivandjiiski, a Bulgarian-born former hedge-fund analyst who was barred from the industry for insider trading by FINRA in 2008.
• The website is registered in Bulgaria at the same address as that of Strogo Sekretno, a site run by Ivandjiiski’s father, Krassimir Ivandjiiski — formerly KGB.
• They turned high-frequency trading “into a big political issue”. They found a hack (Eric Hunsader) and kept spreading his lies until Michael Lewis wrote a book about it and completely legitimized it.
• Zero Hedge has grown from a blog to an Internet powerhouse. Often distrustful of the ‘establishment’ and almost always bearish, it’s known for a pessimistic world view. Like posts entitled Stocks Are In a Far More Precarious State Than Was Ever Truly Believed Possible and America’s Entitled (And Doomed) Upper Middle Class
• Zero Hedge has the MO of a Soviet agitprop operation: it reliably peddles Russian propaganda and very often links to Russia Today.
• Lokey said: “I can’t be a 24-hour cheerleader for Hezbollah, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Trump anymore. It’s wrong. Period.”
• he was pressured to frame issues in a way he felt was “disingenuous,” summarizing its political stances as “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.”
• Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge

France’s rising nationalist party linked to Trump and Russia

Marine Le Pen is president of the National Front party of France — a nationalist, conservative party that’s gaining power in France. (wikipedia, dailybeast, nytimes)

• Presidential candidate in France, currently neck and neck for the lead on the first ballot
• Her party has received a $11.7 million loan from a Russian bank, as an apparent reward for her far-right party’s support of Russian stances in the Ukrainian conflict
• Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder and retired leader of the party, has also taken a separate $2.5 million loan from an obscure Cyprus-based holding company called Vernonsia Holdings Ltd. via a Swiss bank account. The holding belongs to Yuri Kudimov, a former KGB agent who ran another Russian bank called VEB Capital, the financing arm of the Kremlin.
• She has proposed breaking France’s relationship with NATO’s command in favor of a new alliance that would include Russia.
• Her father, Jean-Marie, has long had ties to Russia’s ruling officials. In recent years, Le Pen family members have been frequent visitors to the Russian Embassy.
• She’s anti-USA and says: “the process of demonization of Russia is taking place at the level of the EU leadership and at the wishes of the US, which is trying to create a unipolar world”
• Pro-Putin: “I admire Vladimir Putin. He makes mistakes, but who doesn’t?”
• Ranked second-most influential member of European parliament, after president of that parliament
• Runs similar campaign as Trump, against illegal immigration: “Europe can’t welcome everyone… We would be pleased to take them all in our boat, but it’s not big enough. We’ll all go to the bottom.”

While investigating the subreddits with heavy activity from rt.com, I found r/Le_Pen:

It’s the r/The_Donald of France. You see a similar language as r/The_Donald

• “France. Upvote so when people Google France Le Pen shows up. MARINE”
• “Brexit, President Trump. I have total faith in Le Pen. Godspeed navigators! PEPE”

They use the same mascot, Pepe, as r/The_Donald

• “We Have Your Back HAUTE ENERGIE” — French version of “high energy” phrase on The_Donald.
• “CUCK. Let’s make sure when people google CUCK, they see this picture at the top” — “Cuck” was used by r/The_Donald for anyone who supported Hillary.

Steve Bannon and these guys are collaborating…

• “I answer yes to the invitation of Stephen Bannon, CEO of @realDonaldTrump presidential campaign, to work together.”
• https://mobile.twitter.com/Marion_M_Le_Pen/status/797489987583438852
• Marion_M_Le_Pen is Marine Le Pen’s niece: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Mar%C3%A9chal-Le_Pen

Who’s Steve Bannon?

• Trump Administration’s newly appointed Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor
• Previously, Trump’s campaign chief
• Executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart News
• Co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute, where he helped orchestrate the publication of Clinton Cash

Vocabulary shared by r/Le_Pen and r/The_Donald :

• The_Donald: God King; Le_Pen: Goddess Mother
• brigade
• high energy / French: haute energie
• cuck / cucked (weird Le_Pen uses this term a lot too)
• based
• kek
• rare
• centipedes
• BTFO
• shitpost
• trigger SJWs
• navigators
• anti-globalist

Most of this vocabulary comes from 4chan.org, a site with 106M monthly visits. It’s an anonymous English-language imageboard website, with a primarily US, UK, Canadian audience. Russian trolls have probably been dominating 4chan for a while, and the alt-right movement started in 4chan.

• The alt-right is a loose group of people with right-wing ideologies who reject mainstream conservatism in the United States. The writings of the group are largely Internet-based and are found on websites such as 4chan and 8chan, where anonymous members create and use Internet memes to express themselves. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right)
• During the presidential debates, a group of 4chan users urged others to skew online polls by repeatedly voting for Trump on online polls. The bogus polls were cited by Trump, Hannity, and Limbaugh.

So Trump, Le Pen, and Russia are possibly linked.

Both Trump & Le Pen ran similar platforms on conservative nationalist parties in France & USA

• Pro-Putin, pro-Russia
• Anti-war, anti-NATO
• Anti-immigration

Both Trump & Le Pen are supported by Russian propaganda troll armies using similar memes via r/The_Donald and r/Le_Pen

Trump and Le Pen parties are working together via Trump Administration’s Steve Bannon

Le Pen uses Russian funding through banks owned by former KGB

Conclusion

Do I think Trump is a Putin puppet? The evidence around Le Pen makes me pause, but I don’t think there’s enough evidence to make a call.

It could simply be that Trump’s promise to get America out of expensive wars is what Putin wants. Hillary was more hawkish against Russia’s bombing of Syria, so Putin didn’t like that. So it would make sense for Putin to use his troll army to support Trump’s election and WikiLeaks to hurt Hillary’s chances.

Russian propaganda is dividing our country, feeding both the left and right. This is what Russia wants us to think:

• “Trump supporters are racist!”
• “Trump protesters are violent!”
• “Government is corrupt!”
• “Media is corrupt!”

By pretending to be patriotic Americans posting this content on social media, they’re using social psychology as a weapon. Thinking your fellow Americans think this way influences your own opinions, more than any logical argument. It has a real effect of changing American opinion, and pretty soon, we all actually start thinking this way.

I know our government also spreads propaganda. The ideology is indeterministic. But at least, the propaganda is more “optimistic”.

At best, this means the top channels for online political discourse are now heavily polluted by Russian trolls and bots, and we have to be careful. Even our personal Facebook feeds are polluted with propaganda shared by our unwitting Facebook friends. It takes effort to distill truth from fiction. So take everything you see online with a grain of salt.

At worst, this means people actually engage with the propaganda, and are brainwashed or slightly psychologically terrorized. There are studies that show that watching TV exposes your mind to triggers (sex, tension building up in a TV show, terrorist attacks) and immediately reduces your willpower, increasing your chances of overeating, smoking, or whatever existing addiction you have. This Russian propaganda is even more pernicious because on top of the normal “fight or flight” response, it encourages an ideological shift towards “indeterministic pessimism”. Metaphorically or even literally, this makes people want to drown themselves in opiates (video games, weed) because the real world seems dark. It definitely doesn’t make anyone believe in the future, believe they can trust their neighbors, or believe they can engage with government in a deterministic optimistic way.

But there’s hope. Psychology says that being aware of “goal contagion” or propaganda’s presence is actually a form of “counteractive control”, and with this awareness, seeing more propaganda actually strengthens willpower against its message. So hopefully, all this research helps with that.

UPDATE: Facebook & Google are fighting back on “fake news” already:

• http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-bans-fake-news-sites-from-using-its-advertising-network-1479175778
• http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/14/13630722/google-fake-news-advertising-ban-2016-us-election

(original Medium post with better formatting & sources: https://medium.com/@johnsmithwrote/wikileaks-russian-propaganda-in-us-election-399ad1b5e63a)