Disinformation as a service? DaaS not good!
Disinformation as a service? DaaS not good! (Read my column: https://goo.gl/41gsao ) Oh, great. Bots are buying ads now. Facebook said this week that an internal investigation uncovered 470 fraudulent Facebook accounts and pages linked to a Russian "troll farm" that bought 3,300 Facebook ads costing around $100,000 during the recent U.S. presidential election. The organization that spent all that money and placed all those ads is formerly known as the Internet Research Agency. It's a Russia-based company profiled two years ago in The New York Times that has, according to a source quoted in the story, "industrialized the art of trolling." Lost in the chatter about this "troll farm" and its connection to the Kremlin is the fact that it's a private company owned by businessman and restaurateur Evgeny Prigozhin. His "product" is literally disinformation as a service (DaaS). And DaaS is about to become big business – and one that targets big ...