Russian web brigades: Difference between revisions

The Internet brigades or Web brigades (Russian: Веб-бригады simplified Chinese: 网特；; traditional Chinese: 網特)^[1][2] are governmental teams of on-line commentators that participate in political blogs and Internet forums to promote disinformation and prevent free discussions of undesirable subjects. Such teams are allegedly affiliated with Russian state propaganda department and security services and with Chinese internet police^[3]. The state-sponsored "web brigades" exist along with other organized teams of information fighters that may push private political agendas,^[4] be involved in astroturfing,^[5] or participate in election campaigns.^[6]

This alleged phenomenon in RuNet was described in 2003 by journalist Anna Polyanskaya ^[7] (a former assistant to assassinated Russian politician Galina Starovoitova^[8]), historian Andrey Krivov and political activist Ivan Lomako, from the Center for extreme journalism.

They described organized and professional "brigades", composed of ideologically and methodologically identical personalities, who were working in practically every popular liberal and pro-democracy Internet forums and Internet newspapers of RuNet.

The activity of Internet teams appeared in 1999 and were organized by the Russian state security service, according to Polyanskaya. ^[3][2] According to authors, about 70% of audience of Russian Internet were people of generally liberal views prior to 1998–1999, however sudden surge (about 60-80%) of "antidemocratic" posts suddenly occurred at many Russian forums in 2000.

According to Polyanskaya and her colleagues, the behavior of people from the web brigades has distinct features, some of which are the following:^[2]

• Any change in Moscow's agenda leads to immediate changes in the brigade's opinions.
• Boundless loyalty to Vladimir Putin and his circle.
• Respect and admiration for the KGB and FSB.
• Nostalgia for the Soviet Union and propaganda of the Communist ideology, and constant attempts to present in a positive light the entire history of Russia and the Soviet Union, minimizing the number of people who died in repressions.^[2]
• Anti-liberal, anti-American, anti-Chechen, anti-Semitic and anti-western opinions. Xenophobia, racism, approval of skinheads and pogroms.^[2]
• Accusation of Russophobia against everyone who disagrees with them.
• Hatred of dissidents and human rights organizations and activists, political prisoners and journalists, especially Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Kovalev, Elena Bonner, Grigory Pasko, Victor Shenderovich, and Valeria Novodvorskaya.
• Emigrants are accused of being traitors of the motherland. Some members will claim that they live in some Western country and tell stories about how much better life is in Putin's Russia.
• Before the Iraq War, the brigade's anti-U.S. operations reached unseen scale. The original publication describes: "it sometimes seemed that the U.S. was not liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein, but at a minimum had actually launched an attack on Russia and was marching on the Kremlin." However, it fell silent suddenly after Putin announced that Russia was not opposed to the victory of the coalition forces in Iraq.^[2]

These brigades reportedly use a number of common tactics.

• Frequent changes of pseudonyms.^[2]

• Round-the-clock presence on forums. At least one of the uniform members of the team can be found online at all times, always ready to repulse any “attack” by a liberal.^[2]

• Intentional diversion of pointed discussions. For instance, the brigade may claim that Pol Pot never had any connection with Communism or that not a single person was killed in Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by Soviet tanks.

• Individual work on opponents. "As soon as an opposition-minded liberal arrives on a forum, expressing a position that makes them a clear "ideological enemy”, he is immediately cornered and subjected to “active measures” by the unified web-brigade. Without provocation, the opponent is piled on with abuse or vicious “arguments” of the sort that the average person cannot adequately react to. As a result, the liberal either answers sharply, causing a scandal and getting himself labeled a “boor” by the rest of the brigade, or else he starts to make arguments against the obvious absurdities, to which his opponents pay no attention, but simply ridicule him and put forth other similar arguments."^[2]

• Accusations that opponents are working for “enemies”. The opponents are accused of taking money from Berezovskiy, the CIA, the MOSSAD, Saudi Arabia, the Zionists, or the Chechen rebels.

• Making personally offensive comments. Tendency to accuse their opponents of being insane during arguments.

• Remarkable ability to reveal personal information about their opponents and their quotes from old postings, sometimes more than a year old.

• Teamwork. "They unwaveringly support each other in discussions, ask each other leading questions, put fine points on each other’s answers, and even pretend not to know each other. If an opponent starts to be hounded, this hounding invariably becomes a team effort, involving all of the three to twenty nicknames that invariably are present on any political forum 24 hours a day."^[2]

• Appealing to the Administration. The members of teams often "write mass collective complaints about their opponents to the editors, site administrators, or the electronic “complaints book”, demanding that one or another posting or whole discussion thread they don’t like be removed, or calling for the banning of individuals they find problematic."^[2]

• Destruction of inconvenient forums. For example, on the site of the Moscow News, all critics of Putin and the FSB "were suddenly and without any explanation banned from all discussions, despite their having broken none of the site’s rules of conduct. All the postings of this group of readers, going back a year and a half, were erased by the site administrator."^[2]

Alexander Yusupovskiy, head of the analytical department of the Federation Council of Russia (Russian Parliament) asserted that web brigades are a conspiracy theory.^[9] Yusupovskiy's points included:

• There is difference between "dislike of hegemonic policy of the United States" at Russian forums and "quite friendly attitude towards usual Americans". Aggression and xenophobia doesn't characterize one side but is a common place of polemics, well met not only among Russian patriots, but among Russian emigrants from US, Israel, or other countries as well.
• Change of attitude of virtual masses in 1998-1999 could be caused by Russian financial collapse which "crowned liberal decade", rather than "mysterious bad guys".
• Authors exclude from their interpretation of events all other hypotheses, such as internet activity of a group of some "skinheads", nazbols; or hackers able to get IP addresses of their opponents.
• Officeers of GRU or FSB have more topical problems, than "comparing virtual penises" with liberals and emigrants.^[9]Yusupovskiy concluded that

"We would never make our country's military organizations and security services work under the rule of law and legal control, if won't learn to recognize rationally and objectively their necessity and usefulness for the country, state, society and citizens. Sweeping defamation and intentional discreditation with the help of "arguments", which are obviously false, only contribute to the extrusion of security services outside of rule of law and instigates them to chaos".^[9]

Russian intelligence expert Andrei Soldatov made the following points when asked by Yevgenia Albats about "web brigades" ^[10]:

• Russian state security teams actively disrupt work of certain political blogs;
• One of the teams, who called themselves GRU officers, was actively involved in a disinformation campaign prior to US invasion of Iraq;
• The teams are also involved in hacker attacks, and they have probably attacked his own web site during the Moscow theater hostage crisis;
• Some of the "web brigades" are coordinated by the Russian signals intelligence, which is currently a part of the FSB and has been formerly a part of 16th KGB department;
• There are also such teams from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Paul Goble, director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, claims "the Kremlin has dispatched its own “agents of influence” to political forums on the Internet both to portray itself as having more support than it has and to suggest that its opponents who would like to see a more democratic Russia with closer ties to the West are an ever more marginal group"^[11]

In 2007 sociological analysis of big groups in Russian society published at Russian resource RIO-Center, it's mentioned that idea of existence of web-brigades is a widespread conspiracy theory in RuNet. Authors say "it's difficult to say whether hypothesis of existence of web-brigades corresponds to reality", "web brigades are conspiracy theory" but acknowledge that the users profess views on the existence of "web-brigades". ^[12]

A member of National Bolshevik Party Roman Sadykhov reported about "LiveJournal fighters", directed and paid from the Kremlin and instructions given to them by Vladislav Surkov, a close aide of Vladimir Putin ^[13] Surkov allegedly called Livejournal "a very important sector of work" ^[14] and said that people's brains must be "nationalized" . He instructed "LiveJournal fighters" that

"We are losing in the Internet in that respect. It is always easier to break down things than to do something positive. What you are doing are jokes and minor infractions. Not only methods, but also goals must be radical. We must blow this romantics out of them [our opponents]. It is important not only to protect the authorities - this is understood, but we need to attract young people who can work creatively in the Internet. This is an important communication place of young people. Make them interested in conversations with you."^[14]

The alleged FSB activities on the Internet have been described in the short story "Anastasya" by Russian writer Grigory Svirsky, who was interested in the moral aspects of their work.^[15] He wrote: "It seems that offending, betraying, or even "murdering" people in the virtual space is easy. This is like killing an enemy in a video game: one does not see a disfigured body or the eyes of the person who is dying right in front of you. However, the human soul lives by its own basic laws that force it to pay the price for the virtual crime in his real life".^[3]

Russian "Internet brigades" reportedly appeared in Poland in 2005. According to claims of anonymous "Polish experts on Russian affairs", reported by the Polish newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny, "at least a dozen active Russian agents work in Poland, also investigating the Polish Internet. They are claimed to scrutinize Polish websites (like those supporting Belarusian opposition), and also to perform such actions, as—for instance—contributing to Internet forums on large portals (like Gazeta.pl, Onet.pl, WP.pl). Labeled as Polish Internet users, they incite anti-Semitic or anti-Ukrainian discussions or disavow articles published on the web."^[16]

It has been reported^[1] that in 2005, departments of provincial and municipal governments in mainland China began creating teams of Internet commentators from propaganda and police departments and offering them classes in Marxism, propaganda techniques, and the Internet. They are reported to guide discussion on public bulletin boards away from politically sensitive topics by posting opinions anonymously or under false names. "They are actually hiring staff to curse online", said Liu Di, a Chinese student who was arrested for posting her comments in blogs.

It was reported that Dutch police have set up an Internet Brigade to fight cybercrime. Among its planned actions are to infiltrate internet newsgroups and discussion forums for intelligence gathering, to make pseudo-purchase and to provide services.^[17].

A number of publications suggested that intelligence agents may have infiltrated Wikipedia to remove undesirable information ^[18] The design and application of WikiScanner technology proved such suspicions to be well founded, although it remains unknown how many agents from around the world operate in Wikipedia ^{[19] [20] [21] [22] [23]}

• Information warfare
• Harassment by computer
• Jingjing and Chacha
• Computer crime
• Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China
• Astroturfing
• Political repression of bloggers and cyber-dissidents

The original publication:

• Translation to English: Commissars of the Internet - The FSB at the Computer. By Anna Politkovskaya, Andrei Krivov, and Ivan Lomko.

Discussions of existence of web-brigades in RuNet:

• Russophone LiveJournal community FSB Brigade for Smothering Democracy
• Discussion of the article Red Web Brigades at Nnov.Ru (in Russian)
• Discussion of control over internet and personal security with Yevgeniya Albats at Moscow-based radio channel Echo Moskvy. (in Russian)