Russian Social Media Disruption Report

Hot Singles In Your Area Want to Putin💋

If you’ve participated at all in comments online over the past year, the certainty is near 100% that you’ve seen other people called or have been called yourself, a “troll,” “shill,” or maybe even a <gasp> “Russian.”

Accusations like these are rampant online, as is the paranoia which fosters them, thanks in no small part to a cloud of sensationalist media coverage and our seemingly intrinsic need to find bad guys lurking around every corner…

Part 1: Disrupting democracy

Showtime’s most recent season of Homeland — season 6, episode 9 (2017) — portrays a shadowy quasi-governmental, private tech startup called the Office of Policy Coordination. Located six floors underground in a nondescript office building outside Washington, DC, the company is found to be responsible for secretly running a massive army of phony sock-puppet accounts across social media, posing as ordinary people in order to advance a nefarious political agenda.

Here’s a two minute clip for reference: