Moscow has been accused of financing an “army of trolls” to post pro-Russian opinions across the internet, The Kremlin, however, is not the only government intent on using the web to promote a particular point of view. Here is what some of the others are doing:



Britain

In files leaked by Edward Snowden last year, GCHQ was shown to have developed tools to influence online debates, change the outcome of polls, “amplify” sanctioned messages on YouTube and send spoof emails from registered accounts.

First Look Media, which published the leaks, described it as the UK spy agency’s weapon in mastering the dark arts of the internet, a “hacker’s buffet for wreaking online havoc”.



It claimed that GCHQ staff were encouraged to “think big” about what they could build to help facilitate “internet deception”.

GCHQ said that their programs, with codenames such as Warpath, Silver Lord and Rolling Thunder, were all “in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework” subject to “rigorous oversight”, a claim queried by Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who set up First Look Media.

The database holding the programs had been accessed more than 20,000 times, but there is no evidence that they have ever been deployed for use beyond GCHQ staff.

Ukraine

Ukraine also employs internet manipulation as a tactic, albeit a little more publicly.

In December 2014 the information ministry was launched to counter Russian propaganda, and it was quickly dubbed the “ministry of truth” by those making allusions to its Orwellian nature.

A few months later the information minister, Yuriy Stets, set up an “information army”, recruiting online Ukrainians to fight on the most important front of all - the information front. In an interview with Radio Free Europe, Stets said that more than 20,000 people had agreed to devote their time to the “daily struggle”.

The BBC reported that one of the first tasks for the project, also known as the i-Army, was to create social media accounts and amass friends posing as residents of eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine is playing catch up with Russia, which has mastered both covert and overt tactics – from investing in Russia Today’s global expansion to the Sputnik news agency, set up to counter “aggressive propaganda” from the west. The Economist has described the effort as “a new art” for Ukraine of which “the learning curve is steep”.

India

In the run up to India’s 2014 elections, both the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and the Congress party were were accused of hiring “political trolls” to talk favourably about them on blogs and social media.

The Times of India said that people with good online capital were approached to participate, including those who had had their opinions featured in mainstream media. The Indian press has also written about a group of Twitter trolls fiercely defending the BJP and its leader and Indian prime minster, Narendra Modi.

China

The Chinese government is also believed to run an army of netizens to reinforce favourable opinion towards it and the Communist Party of China (CCP), dubbed the “50-cent army” in reference to how much they are said to paid.



The human rights watchdog Freedom House described the effort as “a comprehensive CCP policy, accompanied by a vast system of trainings and rewards.”

Government officials don’t refer to the 50-cent army by name, but in 2010 an editorial in the state-backed Global Times discussed the “invisible commenters” of the web. Various people claiming to be former lieutenants have spoken out and last year a bunch of hacked emails described in detail how internet commenters in the small town of Ganzhou were instructed to guide conversations on the web.

In 2013 an “internet opinion analyst” became an officially recognised occupation in China, and the Beijing Morning Post estimated that 2 million people were being employed to monitor and analyse public opinion for decision makers.



As is the case with Russia, it has been a challenge for analysts to distinguish between people working for the government in an official capacity, paid trolls and those active on message boards who genuinely hold nationalist sentiments.

