Puppets and Puppeteers In Information Wars

When checking a reaction to any event in popular blogs it is always interesting to separate comments into different categories. There are people who agree or disagree to the author’s point of view, there are people who just dropping their 2 cents and there are people who just want to “chime in”, so that their user name and web site show up. In blog communities, namely LiveJournal, that’s very popular among Russian-speaking crowd, things go a little different, especially for a political event. Once something major breaks in – and by major I understand something attracting hundreds and hundreds of comments – a very special kinds of trolls crawl from under the bridges. Some of them are, indeed, creatures of their own low self-esteem. Others, however, appear to be on government’s payroll. Given the ultra-patriotism that Russian government under Putin was imposing it was both amazing and scary to watch the proliferation of “paid ultra-patriotic trolls” (PUPTs, which sounds close enough to “puppets”) throughout the Russian-speaking web.

Some of those PUPTs can type in English, as we have seen on this thread and others.