Apparently, comment sections in Russia are serious business.
Adrian Chen was the special guest on this week's episode of BuzzFeed’s Internet Explorer podcast. Chen recently published a monster of a piece called "The Agency" in The New York Times Magazine.
Chen's piece focuses on armies of well-paid Russian "trolls" that are wrecking havoc all over the internet. Essentially, the way it works is that a group of people working from an office building in St. Petersburg register hundreds of social media accounts and then start disseminating fake information all over the web.
Last year, they got a hashtag about a possible chemical leak in Louisiana to start trending. There was no leak. But if you checked the #ColumbianChemicals hashtag at the time, you would have seen grainy photos and videos. One fake CNN screenshot being shared said the whole thing was done by ISIS.
Chen noticed the unusual activity. It lined up with a piece he had read on BuzzFeed.