President Vladimir Putin is on a mission to expand Russian ideology and is employing social media trolls to effect political change. The director of NATO’s strategic communications command in Riga, Latvia, says that the Russians are using modern propaganda methods to effect change in their favor and that Britain is not immune from the results. Jānis Sārts says that the Russians are in a digital information offensive against non-Russians. The Independent reports: Sitting at a long table in a conference room at the whitewashed Nato headquarters, Sārts cannot see the logic of Russia invading Latvia in the near future, as it did Georgia and Ukraine, but he will not beat around the bush: “It is not at all impossible.” Last week the 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 [...]