E-DUB
February 18, 2018, 4:08pm
2
Sounds like fake news to me (somebody had to say it).
wevets
February 18, 2018, 4:11pm
3
I have a big problem with this part of the interview:
Had you heard that Yevgeny Prigozhin was behind the factory’s operations?
That response reads a lot like the Washington Post was being trolled in this very interview. It’s not the only interpretation (maybe voice inflection would indicate this was a joke, and that gets lost in the transcript) but it’s one that occurs to me.
A possibility if there is only one data point (i.e., this one interviewee, who is anonymous). See this is why I needed the Dopers.
wevets
February 18, 2018, 4:56pm
5
The interviewee isn’t anonymous in this case:
One of them, 43-year-old Marat Mindiyarov, a teacher by training, spoke by phone with The Washington Post on Saturday from the village outside St. Petersburg where he lives. Mindiyarov worked in a department for Russian domestic consumption.
Doesn’t mean he’s not tweaking the reporter’s nose, but he’s not anonymous.
Dunno. I wonder how much participation this thread will receive, since the content is paywalled. You’ve provided zero incentive for me to waste one of my monthly allottment of free articles.
(Not sure how much quoting I can get away with, here…)
…43-year-old Marat Mindiyarov, a teacher by training, spoke by phone with The Washington Post on Saturday from the village outside St. Petersburg where he lives. Mindiyarov worked in a department for Russian domestic consumption. When he took a test in December 2014 to move to the factory’s “Facebook department” targeting the U.S. market, Mindiyarov recalled, he was asked to write an essay about Hillary Clinton. Here are lightly edited excerpts of the conversation.
What was your first reaction when you heard about the Mueller indictment?
I congratulate America that they achieved something — that they put forward an indictment rather than just writing about this. I congratulate Robert Mueller.
How did you end up at the troll factory?
I worked there from November 2014 to February 2015. I ended up there totally by accident — I happened to be unemployed, and this place had work right by my house. So I went there. I realized quickly that this was the kind of place where I only wanted to spend enough time until I got my salary and I could leave.
How did it feel inside?
I arrived there, and I immediately felt like a character in the book “1984” by George Orwell — a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line. The volumes were colossal — there were huge numbers of people, 300 to 400, and they were all writing absolute untruths. It was like being in Orwell’s world.
(I’m guessing it’s outright plagiarism to copy the rest of this interview over two or three more posts.)
jasg
February 18, 2018, 7:01pm
8
The Seattle Times has a similar WaPost article today.
The 21st-century Russian sleeper agent is a troll with an American accent
“I was supporting Donald Trump anyway. I didn’t need persuading,” said Max Christiansen, 28, a lawyer in Jupiter, Florida, who volunteered to host a get-together after seeing a request for volunteers posted online by “Being Patriotic.”
When Sherrie Hyer, 63, a retired sales representative from the Villages community in Sumter County, Florida, got a message through Facebook from a stranger in August 2016 asking her if she would organize a pro-Trump rally later that month on a particular street corner in Oxford, Florida, she was neither surprised nor concerned.
The new excuse “It doesn’t matter, but would have done it anyway”…
TruCelt
February 19, 2018, 11:02am
9
Just right-click the link, then use your browser’s “incognito” or “Private” setting to open the article. WaPo and NYT will both open for you that way. WSJ will too, but it makes you turn your adblocker off.
BigT
February 19, 2018, 12:59pm
10
This is WaPo. That bit with OKeefe (the anti-ACORN guy) already shows they do their research before printing this stuff. They aren’t just falling for what they want to hear.
The Seatle Times article appears to be a write up about the indictment story that includes some stuff from the interview.