While Donald Trump pretends there is nothing to see here, Russia expands its troll factory.

Courtesy of Unian:  

As the city’s leading business daily Delovoy Peterburg reports in an investigative article published just before New Year, the 4,000 square meters of their previous address on 55, Savushkina Street have been replaced by 12,000 square meters in St Petersburg’s Lakhta business district, according to the Euromaidan Press. 

The impressive threefold increase of workspace is a testimony to the success of the “factory”. As Russian RBC Daily’s investigation in April 2017 showed, the trolling activities have now branched out into a conglomerate of at least 16 different online outlets, all of which voice strong support for Kremlin’s policies, while systematically linking to each other’s products. At the same time, they carry little or no advertisement. 

The owner of the “troll factory”, businessman and billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin, has also become known as “Putin’s chef” because of his success in providing catering services for, among other clients, the Kremlin and other branches of the Russian government. Mr Prigozhin has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for providing financial support for Russia’s military occupation of Ukraine. Delovoy Peterburg’s investigation also reveals that the owners of the new premises are contributors to President Putin’s election campaign. 

The infamous Russian troll factory also known as Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been reportedly run by Putin’s ally Yevgeny Prigozhin in the Russian city of Saint-Petersburg. For years, the agency has been pushing pro-Russian narratives to promote the Kremlin’s interests in the world attempting to influence domestic policy and public opinion in the EU, U.S., Ukraine, and other countries, or just supporting opposite extreme opinions to sow chaos in target countries. 

And while this is happening the Trump Administration has not really lifted a finger to keep us safe.

At least the FBI is doing something.

Courtesy of Business Insider:  

The FBI plans to alert U.S. companies and the public about efforts by Russia or other nations to use disinformation and social media manipulation to interfere in upcoming elections, while being careful not to upset free speech and constitutional rights, a top law enforcement official said. 

The direction that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “foreign influence" task force is heading could dramatically reshape the relationship between government and social media companies in order to address vulnerabilities that enabled Russia to meddle in the 2016 election. 

“We’ve been reluctant in some instances to share the amount of information of what we know about what’s happening," said Jeffrey Tricoli, a top FBI official heading the task force. “You can’t stay with the same strategy if you think there needs to be changes. So going forward there’s going to be opportunities for us to share information in better ways.” 

FBI Director Christopher Wray announced late last year that the task force had been created. But almost everything about it has been secretive to date. Tricoli provided the first extensive public comments about it during an FBI conference in New York Wednesday co-sponsored by Fordham University.

Does that seem a little too tentative to anybody else? 

You know if this were a conventional war I do not think the FBI would simply be telling people not to stand right there because there might be a bomb coming. They would be fighting back.

I think we all know that if Hillary Clinton had won that 2018 election that there would be a far more aggressive campaign to deal with Russian interference.