Europe’s new cold war turns digital as Vladimir Putin expands media offensive

Last week the NATO Centre of excellence in Riga unveiled the results of research into what it claims is a “preparatory information war” in Latvia but with, it emerges, much wider repercussions.

One project examined 200,000 comments posted on Latvia’s three main online news portals between 29 July and 5 August 2014. It found 1.45% of those comments were from “hybrid trolls,” a phenomenon that came to light recently when it emerged that Russia had set up warehouses in which an army of bloggers sat day and night, charged with flooding the internet with comments favourable to Russian interests. But in some stories, more than half of the comments were by Russian trolls – identified partly by their poor grammar, repetition of content and IP address.