Leaked email from DNC confirms paid trolls

[L. Coyote]

70. Ironic, pushing back at disruptor trolls becomes fodder for trolls.

Web brigades in Russian, known in English as troll armies, are being used by Trump.

from wiki:

In 2013, a Freedom House report stated that 22 of 60 countries examined have been using paid pro-government commentators to manipulate online discussions, and that Russia has been at the forefront of this practice for several years, along with China and Bahrain.[18][19] In the same year, Russian reporters investigated the St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency, which employs at least 400 people. They found that the agency covertly hired young people as "Internet operators" paid to write pro-Kremlin postings and comments, smearing opposition leader Alexei Navalny and U.S. politics and culture.[20][21]

“Each commenter was to write no less than 100 comments a day, while people in the other room were to write four postings a day, which then went to the other employees whose job was to post them on social networks as widely as possible.[20] ”

Some Russian opposition journalists state that such practices create a chilling effect on the few independent media outlets that remain in the country.[19]

Further investigations were performed by Novaya Gazeta and Institute of Modern Russia in 2014–15, inspired by the peak of activity of the pro-Russian brigades during the war in Donbass and assassination of Boris Nemtsov.[22][23][24][25] The effort of using "troll armies" to promote Putin's policies is a multimillion-dollar operation.[26] According to The Guardian investigation the flood of pro-Russian comments is part of a coordinated "informational-psychological war operation".[27] One Twitter bot network was documented to use more than 20,500 fake Twitter accounts to spam negative comments after the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and events related to the war in Donbass.[28][29]

DU admin has log files that can identify where posts come from and block the IP addresses. I use my own domain. You paste a 1x1 pixel white image in a post, no one can even see it is there. The file has a unique name, so you search the log file and read who downloaded the image. You can see the IP of every computer that read the post. I harvested George W. Bush's personal computer address this way by posting on his Facebook.