Researchers: Russian government provided English training to online Russian trolls

[Pugster]

Russian trolls were trained so that their tweets/Facebook fake news would appear as grammatically correct as possible in the english language, as part of their misinformation campaign aimed at boosting Donald Trump's chances to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Mother Jones (Sep. 28, 2017):

In studying Russia’s propaganda efforts targeting both domestic and international populations, the Oxford researchers found evidence of increasing military expenditures on social-media operations since 2014. They also learned of a sophisticated training system for workers employed by Putin’s disinformation apparatus: “They have invested millions of dollars into training staff and setting targets for them,” Bradshaw says. She described a working environment where English training is provided to improve messaging for Western audiences: Supervisors hand out topical talking points to include in coordinated messaging, workers’ content is edited, and output is audited, with rewards given to more productive workers.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/fake-news-including-from-russian-sources-saturated-battleground-states-trump-barely-won/

[BigmanPigman]

1. I am sooooo oops glad our government is doing everything possible

to stop and prevent this from continuing.

[MineralMan]

2. Well, the US Government spent a pile of money

teaching me Russian while I was in the USAF, back in the mid 60s. They sent me and a bunch of other young enlisted guys to a 9-month total immersion, 24-hour-per-day Russian language school located at Syracuse University. From day 1, we were not allowed to speak anything but Russian while on the site. It was awkward for a week or so, but the whole thing started with everyday necessary speech, and had at least some of us dreaming in Russian by the end of that 9 months. At least some of us were accent-free and quite fluent in just 9 months. Everyone was very competent, due to the language aptitude testing that led to selection of students. All instructors were native Russian speakers and classroom size was less than 12 students. Intense.

I can't discuss why they did that or what use that skill was to the USAF, but it was interesting, to say the least, and very effective. We've been doing that for a very long time, as have other super-powers, and in many languages.

This is not a surprising story. The Russians have engaged in this type of training since shortly after WWII. So have we. It's a necessity, I suppose. It's sort of a standard thing. What nations do with the people they have trained varies widely, I suppose.

[Leith]

3. They Are Not Entirely Successful

The Russian language does not have definite or indefinite articles. Incorrect usage of those is a dead giveaway.

[MineralMan]

4. That's true, to some degree, of course.

Since Russian is a highly-inflected language, articles are not required. Mostly, neither are pronouns in most conversational and many written settings. The verb conjugation contains the pronoun information. Russian grammar is complex, as well, even more so than Latin grammar, and the language is full of verb prefixes that sometimes defy understanding when used with different verbs.

English is complicated in different ways. For example, it's almost impossible to predict how to pronounce English words one does not already know. In Russian, pronunciation is quite regular, and you can read aloud a passage that contains words that you don't understand without any pronunciation errors.

English is highly irregular throughout. It's fairly rigid with word order, and that's very difficult to learn for Russians, as well, since Russian uses word order in sentences very differently that we do, since the words can be placed almost anywhere in a sentence due to the inflection of word endings in all parts of speech. Russians use word order for emphasis, while English requires careful attention to word order. That part of English is learned over a lifetime of use.

So, as you say, it's often fairly easy to detect a native Russian speaker who is writing in English. It's very difficult to gain a natural writing style in English if you grew up speaking Russian or many other languages. Chinese, too, is a very difficult language for those transitioning to English. It also lacks articles, and most plural forms of verbs and nouns. I can always spot a Chinese native speaker writing in English, no matter how long that person has been using English.