How to recognize russian trolls in a forum:
1.
From my personal experience on russian internet-sites I can tell that their primary goal is not to support Trump. Their primary goal is to divide US-society and pit people against each other. That's why russian propaganda supplies both sides: people who love Trump and people who hate Trump.
Russian propaganda treats the US as two separate entities:
- Trump gets favorable treatment.
- The US as a country gets a demonizing treatment.
So, if you love Trump (and by extension the US), you will find articles that support your worldview. And if you hate the US, you will find articles that support your worldview. Trump is only made look bad as a sidenote in articles primarily attacking the US.
2.
They play fast and loose with facts. Facts don't matter, because these trolls address an echo-chamber or try to create an echo-chamber. There are several basic, yet grave, concepts (such as "you can't trust X" ) that get repeated so often until they have been normalized and serve as foundations for further arguments.
3.
They emphasize that you can't trust anybody.
You cannot trust the government because they are all evil imperialists or work for Wall Street or the Deep State or are in cahoots with the Clintons.
You cannot trust the media because they work for Wall Street or the Deep State or the Clintons or the Elders of Zion/Bilderbergers/Rothschilds/George Soros.
You cannot trust scientists because the truth is that nobody knows how anything works. ( 
)
Their goal is to create a climate of anxiousness, isolation, mistrust.
4.
You can recognize them by the patterns of their comments. They bring up a topic and then use that as an excuse to spread a talking-point. Whataboutism.
And there are firm limits who they are allowed to attack and who they are allowed to treat nicely.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-inside-russian-troll-house
“We had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing,” she said.
...
The trolls worked in teams of three. The first one would leave a complaint about some problem or other, or simply post a link, then the other two would wade in, using links to articles on Kremlin-friendly websites and “comedy” photographs lampooning western or Ukrainian leaders with abusive captions.
Marat shared six of his technical task sheets from his time in the office with the Guardian. Each of them has a news line, some information about it, and a “conclusion” that the commenters should reach.
...
The trolls were firmly instructed that there should never be anything bad written about the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) or the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), and never anything good about the Ukrainian government.
...
As he spoke decent English, Marat was sent for a test in the English language department... Before he was told he had failed, however, other people in the room were told they had passed the preliminary test and were set to work composing comments on two English-language articles about Ukraine – one by the New York Times and another by CNN.
If you think that Democratic Underground is not important enough for Russia to deploy trolls, I would like to remind you that hackers attacked Democratic Underground on election-day 2016 and shut the forum down.
And on a sidenote, in the run-up of the election I regularly got into discussions with a DU-member who was very, very pro-Russia. He joined DU in late 2015. One day before the election he stopped posting and left DU. I do remember his username, but I won't post it here.
= new reply since forum marked as read
