--- title: Russian Propaganda in the Internet Age | TIME description: How Russian Trolls are infiltrating the internet and how to know if you've seen one. canonical: https://time.com/video/5bLRXqYM/ og:title: Russian Propaganda in the Internet Age og:description: How Russian Trolls are infiltrating the internet and how to know if you've seen one. og:url: https://time.com/video/5bLRXqYM/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/5bLRXqYM/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Russian Propaganda in the Internet Age twitter:description: How Russian Trolls are infiltrating the internet and how to know if you've seen one. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/5bLRXqYM/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Russian Propaganda in the Internet Age > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Russian Propaganda in the Internet Age [Watch (HLS stream): Russian Propaganda in the Internet Age](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/5bLRXqYM.m3u8) (6:55)  _Published 2018-05-10. How Russian Trolls are infiltrating the internet and how to know if you've seen one._ --- Jul 28, 2023 4:20 AM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Internet Machine](/video/t9dK5wDj/) ### Internet Machine [One-eyed Cat Becomes Internet Star](/video/36XDUQ1W/) ### One-eyed Cat Becomes Internet Star [Internet Confession](/video/2UAGFXfJ/) ### Internet Confession --- ## Transcript With fake news and Russian trolls dominating the headlines. Russian trolls. A lot of it comes from Russian trolls. It was Russian trolls. 126 million Americans may have been exposed to this content generated by Russian troll farms. By now if you're on the Internet at all you've likely heard of Russian trolls. It may seem a 21st century thing. But trolling has it's roots in the cold war. When the Soviets had a word for spreading false info. They called it spetzpropaganda. And while the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia has found a new way to flex it's muscle in the world. Whereas the Soviet Union tried to promote the idea. Of the Soviet Union as the model society, as a utopia on earth. Russia doesn't try to do this. What it does instead is it tries to muddy the waters. It tries to make things unclear. It tries to sow as much confusion and misinformation as possible that when people see the truth. They find it harder to recognize it. This false information comes from what people have started to call troll farms. And we've even started to hear the stories of ex trolls themselves. [ FOREIGN ] And it is the nature of social media itself. It is its pervasiveness. It's everywhere in the developed world. You can't escape it. When there is so much falsehood, when there is so much propoganda, when it is impossible to distinguish truth from fiction, then our political environment suffers. With comments from 1, 000 trolls Tens of thousands of bots. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] In the fall of 2016, a month before the US Presidential election, Conrad James, a young left leaning activist was contacted by an organization called BlackmattersUS. They said that they're having a rally And if I could be a speaker at their rally, and I looked into their organization, I checked their website, checked their social media. They had a huge social media account, so I was like yeah sure I'll do it. It was one of many protests and rallies in the politically charged year that lead to the election of Donald Trump. [ APPLAUSE ] One year later, James found out that Black Lives Matter US was part of a Russian funded operation whose aim was to sew discord across the US My reaction actually at first, I found it amusing. You know, I thought it was pretty funny and I thought I was just getting played around with and then eventually it got to a point where it's like wow, well this really happened and I got questioned by a lot of people. If I was American or if I was fighting for Russia or Any of these other things saying. The worst part about it is that they chose the activist community. And they basically distracted the activism community from following their own passion in order to promote some type of negative intent. [ MUSIC ] Russia has influenced political environments around the world for years. But Americans are now finally waking up to it. Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted more than a dozen Russian nationals and entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election. [ MUSIC ] [ NOISE ] [ CROSSTALK ] Is your point that we shouldn't have come to show our support for President Trump? No, not at all, my point is it's just that it says here that he was- I don't care what that paper says. I don't care, I don't care. This is Frederick Lynn, a Trump supporter from New York. He attended a pro- Trump rally in November of 2016 after the election. We showed him how that rally matched the description in the Muller indictment. But he told us he didn't believe Russians had anything to do with it. I know that there's different sides. Americans know that there's two groups that aren't getting along. We don't need Russians to point that out. America is no stranger to protesting. It's engrained into the Constitution. So does it actually matter if Russia organized a few protests here? American activism is at risk, I think, of being deligitimized cuz I think that there's now a real argument that can be made that that protest isn't real, that protest is fake. These people are receiving foreign support. Well now we know that that's actually true. Standing Rock received foreign support. Bernie Sanders received foreign support. Donald Trump, everyone who was an opposition candidate or movement received some sort of support. Now we know that. It didn't have to be financial. It could also just be through mimicry and sharing Facebook posts. I think that the basic premise of social protest is that We are the people in the streets representing some sort of, you know, greater form of democracy or more a pure consensus on where the country should go, and our elected representatives have to listen to us. But once we start to believe that our movements are actually being created by foreign governments, then it undercuts the idea that these are citizen- led agendas. Spotting trolls is a difficult thing to do. If you look at the account, you see a lot pro- Kremlin content. You see a lot of pro- Trump content, spelling mistakes. The English is not the first language. It's more likely to be a female account. Not a huge amount of followers. And it's a lot of tweeting at people. That certain articles, alternative sources, that sort of thing. And if you go through the account and it consists of nothing but these recurrent themes, it's more than likely that it's a Russian troll. There is no scientific method for it, because you do get these people anyway. You stay in this game long enough and you begin to Recognize trolls. It's probably not possible at first glance to tell the difference between an authentic social protest and a fake social protest. Precisely because our social protests have become so scripted. So I mean one way I like to tell people for example like, if there's fireworks at the social protest, totally fake. You know this is how we know but I mean again it doesn't really work. You have to develop your revolutionary intuition. You have to try to develop a theory of change and I think that A lot of the danger of Russia's involvement in American activism is they're not invested in positive social change in America. They are quite happy if thousands and millions of American activists waste their time on a social protest as long as it creates unrest in this country. The fact of the matter is we just all need to think critically. I mean, there's so many times that a post gets shared that you have no idea what it's about, but you're just. Reading the headline you're like, yeah, I agree with that even though you didn't check your sources. These are the things that we learned in school but it seems that when we go to the Internet it doesn't follow. 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