Analaysis: Anatomy of a Troll Nest on Steemit

I did some more digging and more information came to light.

Consider this article corroborated by two of my personal most trusted actual news sources, TruthDig and the Associated Press.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ex-workers-russian-troll-factory-trust-u-s-indictment/

Writers: NAIRA DAVLASHYAN and IRINA TITOVA / The Associated Press (you can look up these writers, they exist, for instance here is Naira writing for AFP: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russian-women-desperately-seek-daughters-who-joined-is/ar-AAswDtc)

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"Paid trolls used carefully crafted fake identities that made them come across like real people, she said."

[CRITICAL CONCEPT, REMEMBER THIS]
"The aim of the factory's work was either to influence voters or to undermine their faith in the U.S. political system, the 37-page indictment states."

"The most important principle of the work is to have an account like a real person," Savchuk said. "They create real characters, choosing a gender, a name, a place of living and an occupation. Therefore, it's hard to tell that the account was made for the propaganda."

"We worked in a group of three where one played the part of a scoundrel, the other one was a hero, and the third one kept a neutral position,Ó he said. ÒFor instance, one could write that Putin was bad, the other one would say it was not so, and the third would confirm the position of the second while inserting some picture."

Mindiyarov said he failed the language exam needed to get a job on the Internet Research Agency's Facebook desk, where the pay was double than the domestic side of the factory. The sleek operation produced content that looked as if it were written by native English speakers, he said.

"These were people with excellent language skills, interpreters, university graduates," he said, "It's very hard to tell it's a foreigner writing because they master the language wonderfully."

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We are told by Russian state media that it would be outlandish, insane even, to think that a media operation that takes up an entire building and millions of rubles, would have anything at all to do with Putin. (a real howler. does not pass the sniff test. Russia is a totalitarian authoritarian mafia based government, there are no international media operations that Putin does not know about in the entire country. VPN is even banned there so you couldn't get away with it if you tried. The nature of all state run operations, even the CIA admits this is its modus, that they don't do anything except it is plausibly deniabl and everything on the internet happens to be plausibly deniable.)

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A non-exclusive list of oddly named, wikipedia-article-less "Sources" that I have long suspected of being involved in this kind of operation(if for no other reason than that the names of the sites are stupid) are:
The Free Thought Project
Mint Press News
Activist Post
The Antimedia
Zerohedge
Contraspin.co.nz
(and of course the newcomer Disobedient Media)

to this I will add two actors that have been extremely sketchy and fit the same patterns, which we will see more in a second.
Kim Dotcom
Julian Assange(since he started being friendly with Fox News in 2016 after his internet was cut in october)

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Let's consider this 'free thought journalist'
https://twitter.com/SirMetropolis
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/author/jay-syrmopoulos/

Love of Caitlin Johnstone, Kim Dotcom, Russia Today's Lee Camp, Julian Assange and would you not know, Elizabeth Lea Vos of Disobedient Media. Jay also writes for Activist Post and the Antimedia. Searches for him at the University of Denver don't return anything, nor is there any context for this person outside of this ring of websites. He retweets Ms. Vos from the already disproven Disobedient Media, who was also on the front page of Zerohedge attempting yet again to claim that there are no nests of russian trolls infiltrating american media and politics.

I call it a nest, because the same authors get posted on all of the same sites and lend credibility to each outer without any connection to actually credible sources like the AP/AFP or wikipedia, or the sites that have been known to lie about things like the reasons for the invasion of Iraq but which are nonetheless pillars of the American system, The NYT, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

Bullshit may be easy for you and I, but if Bullshit is your day job, it is actually difficult work. You have to weave a lot of tangled webs, and at the end of the day if you make a single mistake the entire web unravels if you pull on a single thread.

And I happen to be a pro thread-puller, so strap in.

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Consider Suzie Dawson and Simon Wood's work for the deceptively-named Counterspin-mimicking website called 'Contraspin' which only deals with new zealand Kim Dotcom politics.

Check out the comments at the bottom:
https://archive.fo/bVlmE

All repetitive, nearly all on a single day, nearly all obviously bots saying the same thing. Absolutely not credible.

Consider this contraspin page from the wayback, it links Suzie to a writer known as "Simon Wood"
https://web.archive.org/web/20160121231109/https://contraspin.co.nz/

Simon Wood is an interesting character.....he wrote the same article about 'the music of entitlement' for a different website 3 days before it appeared with Suzie3d's writing on Contraspin:
https://archive.fo/FC5Yu

Now Simon Wood is not this Simon Wood who actually has a credible site, I don't want to cast suspicion on this guy:
http://simonwood.net/blog/

But he does have an active twitter, interesting:
https://twitter.com/SimonWood11

He has a clear love of assange, a hatred of the intercept and has retweeted numerous 'crimes of britain' tweets about the crimes of Winston Churchill etc.

He operates the incredibly poorly named "Bsnews.info" and another even more poorly named one.

https://bsnews.info/author/simon-wood/
https://archive.fo/oUKki
https://www.blogger.com/profile/01369788210784619410

His personal blog, found in multiple places, and as stated with crosslinks to the contraspin site which is connected to Suzie3d and the obviously fake comments, is titled something like 'The 9999999%' percent.

https://archive.fo/030RY
which appears also at contraspin: https://archive.fo/VxYJ9

Does any of this look credible to you? How would someone associated with such crap like Suzie Dawson be elevated to a position of trust by a fledgling political party?

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Suzie Dawson is now a politician AND a journalist, and she's claiming she absolutely has to go to Russia for her safety. She clearly was blogging a lot of rambly crap about Occupy Wallstreet long ago, and she is clearly associated with Contraspin and Simon Wood, now in her new rebranding she is associated with Disobedient Media. Her writing disjointed and pedantic, it's difficult stuff to read. She refers to herself as a "kiwi" over and over again. I frequently lose track of what she is even trying to demonstrate in her too-long articles. But it will always vindicate Julian Assange and Kim Dotcom, and it will always portray the FBI and any investigation into Trump's ties with Russia in a bad light. Which is the pattern accross the board here with all of these sites.

So I thought I'd give Suzie3d one more chance to demonstrate any credibility. Certainly if she was harassed by police as a political candidate for the Internet Party, there would be some mention of it in the Internet Party's wikipedia page, right? This would indicate that actual NZ journalists in some other publication had heard of her terrible story of police harassment as a targeted individual needing sanctuary from the FBI in Russia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_(New_Zealand)
https://archive.fo/f6tTF

However, no mention of any of this.

Case closed.

Anyone associated with any of these sites and individuals is simply operating from a troll nest getting paid to spread disinformation that is Pro Trump and Pro Putin.

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From this we can derive useful information:
-Assange is now a fully partisan player, he is not objective and is not to be trusted with leaks.
-Kim Dotcom is part of all this, so nothing he says has any credibility whatsoever (i.e. his trolling of Seth Rich's family)
-The Intercept is hated by Trump and Putin, so they get some bumps upwards in credibility, which fits in nicely with the fact that I've known Glenn Greenwald as a journalist for over 10 years whether or not the ownership of First Look Media is in some way corrupt.
-This troll nest is actively attempting to take over steemit as a base of operations using purchased whale accounts like @#v4vapid who heavily promotes all of these sites and content.

This is not difficult to see. These conclusions are all obvious. I have confirmed it in other posts after giving these same individuals the chance to speak for themselves. It is further corroborated by "Adam Carter's" profile which calls him a 'server administrator' which is simply not something any respecting system administrator would call themselves, one of the few, but not by any means only, english language slip ups in their operations.

Remember this from above:
"The aim of the factoryÕs work was either to influence voters or to undermine their faith in the U.S. political system, the 37-page indictment states."

Can anyone deny that this is what this group is up to? The evidence is undeniable. Their only defense is to prevent analysis such as this and to attack people like myself. (@an0nkn0wledge, @fortified, @clarityofsignal all fit this pattern as well)

The mystery that remains for me is why these obvious troll farm accounts get along so well with The Conscious(sic) Resistance(sic) who actually goes around in person interviewing people and filming protestors at a events while pretending to be an anarchist, and obvious police like @kennyskitchen. That I do not understand unless from either the angle that a. the american police are trying to infiltrate the russian troll nest or b. Trump has instructed parts of the fbi or american police state to act in concert with the russian trolls.

But I don't have to know why someone has no credibility, it just doesn't matter that much. Once I know someone has no credibilty it is actually pretty relieving. I get a free pass not to care about anything they say, not to read anything they write for the rest of all time.

What is it they say about reputation? Takes years to build but only 2 hours of investigation and writing from @mindhawk to lose? Well something like that.

My work here is done.

I would just like to add, Fuck Disinformation agents running. And if you are one of the people doing this crap, rethink your lives, if all of your ancestors and grandparents and parents raised you to lie as a profession, they would have been better off just training you to do something like be an actual prostitute.

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