By Karen Piper
April 6, 2017
I first encountered Russian paid trolls in the comments sections of Russian Television (RT.com) after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. Gradually, I watched them transmogrify into Trump trolls before my eyes and then move on to Brietbart News, InfoWars, and Twitter. Though their profiles changed to "Trump Crusader" or "Pepe for Trump," they could still easily switch into Russian. When I realized that even a Brietbart moderator was one of these Russian trolls, I wrote to the FBI.
To recognize a Russian Trump troll, which is a real person behind a fake Twitter handle, you need to learn the language of the Russian disinformation system. You can find it in the stories that are trending on RT.com and SputnikNews, then watch who who is repeating them. On October 10, 2016, for instance, Trump read a SputnikNews story at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania within hours of its release.
Next, you watch where the story flows. If it is Russian propaganda, it will be tweeted repeatedly by both Russian trolls and "bots," computer programs that constantly retweet propaganda. A person in a warehouse in St. Petersburg will try to promote a specific narrative passed down to him or her by the Kremlin, the troll's daily talking points. But this one person will also have five or so computer programs (their "bots") retweeting other fake accounts to spread the message.
So, by the time Trump had tweeted, "Rice ordered spy docs on Trump?" on April 4, I had watched this particular story started and promotd by a particular a troll known as "MicroMagicJingleTM." On April 5, 2017, Buzzfeed reported (here) about Micro and his band of trolls and bots whose primary job is getting fake stories to “trend,” or rise to the level of news, on Twitter. A few days earlier, their "operation" was to get Susan Rice in the news by retweeting #SusanRiceUnmasked and #SusanRice, followed by the story that Obama had intentionally "unmasked" Tump Team members via Susan Rice. CNN and others then carried on Micro's work by picking up this story. Before you knew it, the Russian story about Susan Rice was on every station in the U.S. and tweeted by the President.
The one thing Buzzfeed missed is that Micro is Russian. When reporter Joe Bernstein approached Micro to ask where he lived, Micro said “Utah.” But Micro had spoken in Russian to me and, after chatting with him for a while, I had also asked him where he lived in Russia. He turned on his Twitter geolocator, a GPS locator that tracks where Tweets are being sent from. "Moscow," it said.
Basically, Micro is a cyberwarfare specialist who is paid by someone to work full time for Trump. The tactic that he was using in building the Susan Rice story is one that goes back to the days of Soviet disinformation campaigns. It's called “whataboutism," meaning, “What about him?” The idea is to blame another person for the exact thing of which you are guilty. Did Russia hack and release Hillary Clinton's emails? No, Micro says, Obama tracked and unmasked Trump's private campaign strategies. Whataboutism.
Roger Stone and Jack Posobiec, a Youtube reporter who works closely with the heads of The Daily Caller and Brietbart, are both followers of Micro. (Posobiec is also fluent in Russian and has a Russian wife.) So is Julian Assange. And here is where it gets hard to tell the Russians and Trumpkins apart. In fact, Micro’s narratives are basically interchangeable with the Trump Team’s, though Micro also has a a global agenda and also pushes Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders, both far-right leaders in Europe supported by Putin.
Micro had said to the Buzzfeed reporter, “There could very well be Russian bots. I just never saw them and we were in this deep. . . . It’s all us, not Russians.” Yet they all seem to speak Russian and can toggle between Russian and U.S. profiles. Once, I irked Micro by saying I would report him to the FBI, and he dox-ed me from his Russian profile, publishing my email address and part of my phone number. He then sent a pack of bots to attack me, inundating me in thousands of retweets to drive me off Twitter. I was also sent memes of Pepe shooting me and my face after an acid attack.
Trump himself has retweeted Micro’s crew of trolls, including @YoungDems4Trump. In fact, a good number of the “people” Trump has retweeted in the past year are bots, including the 16-year-old boy Seth Morton, who drew national media attention when Trump retweeted him. Now, the real Seth Morton is not a troll or bot and certainly is not Russian. He is an actual young man from Huntington Beach with a real Facebook page, a teenager who loves Dr. Phil and the Raiders. But unless this young man Tweets from a laptop all day long, stays up until 3 or 4 a.m., and is obsessed with Marine Le Pen, his Twitter account, @filibuster, is not run by Seth Morton. That Seth Morton is a bot. I asked his father to comment for this article; he declined.
Micro has since moved on to “M ndrew,” where he is building up bots and memes for the next "operation." He claims will occur in two weeks. By the time I post this, he may be someone else. One of the last things Micro said to me was, “Whether or not I’m from Russia working for Putin, I’m not going to stop doing what I’m doing. Sorry.”
April 6, 2017
I first encountered Russian paid trolls in the comments sections of Russian Television (RT.com) after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. Gradually, I watched them transmogrify into Trump trolls before my eyes and then move on to Brietbart News, InfoWars, and Twitter. Though their profiles changed to "Trump Crusader" or "Pepe for Trump," they could still easily switch into Russian. When I realized that even a Brietbart moderator was one of these Russian trolls, I wrote to the FBI.
To recognize a Russian Trump troll, which is a real person behind a fake Twitter handle, you need to learn the language of the Russian disinformation system. You can find it in the stories that are trending on RT.com and SputnikNews, then watch who who is repeating them. On October 10, 2016, for instance, Trump read a SputnikNews story at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania within hours of its release.
Next, you watch where the story flows. If it is Russian propaganda, it will be tweeted repeatedly by both Russian trolls and "bots," computer programs that constantly retweet propaganda. A person in a warehouse in St. Petersburg will try to promote a specific narrative passed down to him or her by the Kremlin, the troll's daily talking points. But this one person will also have five or so computer programs (their "bots") retweeting other fake accounts to spread the message.
So, by the time Trump had tweeted, "Rice ordered spy docs on Trump?" on April 4, I had watched this particular story started and promotd by a particular a troll known as "MicroMagicJingleTM." On April 5, 2017, Buzzfeed reported (here) about Micro and his band of trolls and bots whose primary job is getting fake stories to “trend,” or rise to the level of news, on Twitter. A few days earlier, their "operation" was to get Susan Rice in the news by retweeting #SusanRiceUnmasked and #SusanRice, followed by the story that Obama had intentionally "unmasked" Tump Team members via Susan Rice. CNN and others then carried on Micro's work by picking up this story. Before you knew it, the Russian story about Susan Rice was on every station in the U.S. and tweeted by the President.
The one thing Buzzfeed missed is that Micro is Russian. When reporter Joe Bernstein approached Micro to ask where he lived, Micro said “Utah.” But Micro had spoken in Russian to me and, after chatting with him for a while, I had also asked him where he lived in Russia. He turned on his Twitter geolocator, a GPS locator that tracks where Tweets are being sent from. "Moscow," it said.
Basically, Micro is a cyberwarfare specialist who is paid by someone to work full time for Trump. The tactic that he was using in building the Susan Rice story is one that goes back to the days of Soviet disinformation campaigns. It's called “whataboutism," meaning, “What about him?” The idea is to blame another person for the exact thing of which you are guilty. Did Russia hack and release Hillary Clinton's emails? No, Micro says, Obama tracked and unmasked Trump's private campaign strategies. Whataboutism.
Roger Stone and Jack Posobiec, a Youtube reporter who works closely with the heads of The Daily Caller and Brietbart, are both followers of Micro. (Posobiec is also fluent in Russian and has a Russian wife.) So is Julian Assange. And here is where it gets hard to tell the Russians and Trumpkins apart. In fact, Micro’s narratives are basically interchangeable with the Trump Team’s, though Micro also has a a global agenda and also pushes Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders, both far-right leaders in Europe supported by Putin.
Micro had said to the Buzzfeed reporter, “There could very well be Russian bots. I just never saw them and we were in this deep. . . . It’s all us, not Russians.” Yet they all seem to speak Russian and can toggle between Russian and U.S. profiles. Once, I irked Micro by saying I would report him to the FBI, and he dox-ed me from his Russian profile, publishing my email address and part of my phone number. He then sent a pack of bots to attack me, inundating me in thousands of retweets to drive me off Twitter. I was also sent memes of Pepe shooting me and my face after an acid attack.
Trump himself has retweeted Micro’s crew of trolls, including @YoungDems4Trump. In fact, a good number of the “people” Trump has retweeted in the past year are bots, including the 16-year-old boy Seth Morton, who drew national media attention when Trump retweeted him. Now, the real Seth Morton is not a troll or bot and certainly is not Russian. He is an actual young man from Huntington Beach with a real Facebook page, a teenager who loves Dr. Phil and the Raiders. But unless this young man Tweets from a laptop all day long, stays up until 3 or 4 a.m., and is obsessed with Marine Le Pen, his Twitter account, @filibuster, is not run by Seth Morton. That Seth Morton is a bot. I asked his father to comment for this article; he declined.
Micro has since moved on to “M ndrew,” where he is building up bots and memes for the next "operation." He claims will occur in two weeks. By the time I post this, he may be someone else. One of the last things Micro said to me was, “Whether or not I’m from Russia working for Putin, I’m not going to stop doing what I’m doing. Sorry.”