Early this month, Pando Daily’s Mark Ames (4/2/15) noticed a curious trend: Western media, somewhat strangely, keep breaking the same story of Russia’s paid Internet trolls over and over again as if it’s something new:

The story of how Kremlin trolls are being weaponized to subvert our hallowed social media first broke into the English-language media in mid-March in an article headlined “The Trolls Who Came in From the Cold” — published in, ahem . . . ‘scuse me, somethin’ caught in my throat here… published on the website of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Yes, that’s Radio Liberty, aka “Radio Liberation from Bolshevism” aka the US government’s psychological warfare media outfit set up by the CIA during the Cold War, and covered extensively in Pando by Yasha Levine. The two government outlets [RFE/RL and BBC] bounced the Kremlin Troll Army story back and forth enough times to create critical hack mass, leading to sensational followups everywhere from the tech press to Vice, the New York Post, the Independent, and, today, the Guardian…. It’s the trolling story that keeps on giving, with all the regularity of a herpes outbreak, but with no memory to go with it, because each time this Internet Research Agency story is reported, it’s more shocking than the last time.

Both the original report and a follow-up interview on Radio Free Europe that spurred this latest paranoia, it should be noted, came the exact same week NATO announced a new plan to counter the alleged Russian social media propaganda (AP, 3/22/15):

NATO Commander: West Must Fight Russia in Information ‘War’ NATO’s supreme commander says the West must do more to counter Russia by employing a rapid-reaction approach to Internet communications that counteracts Russia’s “false narratives” spread on social media.

If this appears to be a coordinated messaging effort on behalf of a US military psychological operation, that’s because it almost certainly is. On cue, despite the anonymous sourcing, and the utter staleness of the “revelation” in question, the media uncritically ran with the US government-backed report. In all these stories, however, the rather glaring fact that the US has a long-documented history of manipulating social media is not mentioned once. In fact, the Pentagon’s efforts alone–to say nothing of other US intelligence agencies or other NATO nation states–spent at least 200 times more than Russia, according to the last available figures (Guardian, 3/17/11):

Revealed: US Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media The multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a program called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of Al Qaeda supporters and others ranged against coalition forces. Since then, OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m program.

As Buzzfeed’s Max Seddon (6/2/14) breathlessly reported the third or fourth time this story “broke” last summer:

The bizarre hive of social media activity appears to be part of a two-pronged Kremlin campaign to claim control over the Internet, launching a million-dollar army of trolls to mold American public opinion as it cracks down on internet freedom at home.

While it’s possible the Kremlin has other programs whose budget remains unknown, we can also assume the Guardian‘s 2011 report was not exhaustive of US efforts as well–to say nothing of staunch US allies UK and Israel, both of whom have well-documented programs to propagandize online.

As power centers throughout the globe clamor to influence public opinion online, the pretext of the “other guy” doing it better and faster is essential to continuing the arms race and further handing over social media to cynical, militarized interests of all stripes. Indeed, as Pando‘s Ames pointed out on Twitter, the “Kremlin troll” narrative is new version of the “missile gap”–the wildly inflated assertion by US officials during the Cold War that the Soviet Union had radically more nuclear weapons than the US did.

We now know that was false, and that Soviet military capability was continually hyped up to justify more US military power. But, fed largely by US government sources, convenient leaks, and inevitable cultural myopia, the press routinely frames the manipulation of social media as a uniquely Russian enterprise. This is especially true in how the phenomenon is framed. Indeed, even when acknowledging Western powers manipulate social media, the way it’s presented is radically different:

But when it’s Russia:

Israel has students” “defending” it online. The UK has “warriors” countering “enemy propaganda.” The Kremlin has “trolls” spreading “propaganda.” The general public’s ignorance of how these complicated mechanisms of online infiltration work is heavily shaped by how they’re framed. Notice, for example, the images that go with these reports on Israel vs. Russia paying people en masse to spam comment sections and social media. On one side, you have a daytime shot of patriotic young people waving flags outside Auschwitz:



Above the Atlantic‘s piece, a beast-like Russian “troll” hides in an underground bunker:

Both these countries are doing the exact same thing: paying people to promote their government’s message online. Yet by skimming the headline and graphics, one is given two radically different impressions of their intention and effect.

Another fact that’s left out of stories of Russia’s “Kremlin trolls” is how truly amateur they appear to be. We know that even as far back as 2011, the Pentagon was building sockpuppeting software that would allow US military personnel to operate online personas with relatively greater sophistication, operating as many as ten online personas per person. The Guardian would explain:

The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.” Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated messages, blog posts, chatroom posts and other interventions.

The Air Force’s own RFP makes a lack of discovery by “sophisticated adversaries” essential to awarding the contract; most Russian “trolls” can be spotted by any passing observer. And, it should be noted, what we know about the US’s sockpuppeting capacity is almost four years old (possibly because the most tenacious journalist working to uncover it, Barrett Brown, is currently serving five years in federal prison), so it’s likely far greater now.

Yet here we are, hand-wringing over “revelations” the Kremlin pays some partisans $700 a month to sit in a room to engage in what is a rather routine and common propaganda initiative. Indeed, given the size and scope of what we know about US sockpuppeting efforts and an overall military budget 735 percent greater than Russia’s, one can logically infer that the primary reason US-paid online personas aren’t as well-documented is because US trolls are simply much better at what they do.

Reading Western press, however, one would get the distinct impression the US–with a military budget greater than the next eight countries combined–is really a scrappy underdog looking to catch up to the mass of Kremlin troll hordes. This impression, while making for a neat story, does little to provide proper context or truly explain the informational challenge posed by social media manipulation.

Adam Johnson is a freelance journalist; formerly he was a founder of the hardware startup Brightbox. You can follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc or on his blog Citations Needed.