Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors | Peter Pomerantsev | News | The Guardian:
As Shaun Walker recently reported in this newspaper,
at one “troll factory” in St Petersburg, employees are paid about £500 a
month to pose as regular internet users defending Putin, posting
insulting pictures of foreign leaders, and spreading conspiracy theories
– for instance, that Ukrainian protestors on the Maidan were fed tea
laced with drugs, which led them to overthrow the (pro-Moscow)
government.
Taken together, all these efforts constitute a kind of linguistic
sabotage of the infrastructure of reason: if the very possibility of
rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no
grounds for debate – and the public can be expected to decide that there
is no point in trying to decide the winner, or even bothering to
listen.