Special Counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities details an elaborate scheme designed to infiltrate and influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election using various on- and offline tactics and relying heavily on technology and social media.
Allegedly leading this effort was Russian catering magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin, often called “Putin’s chef” because of his close ties to President Vladimir Putin. U.S. intelligence officials concluded in December that Putin’s top aides had to approve, if not directly oversee, Prigozhin’s operation, according to a classified NSA report, parts of which were shared with The Washington Post.
The NSA report also said that the Internet Research Agency, which ran online disinformation campaigns in Russia itself and in foreign nations such as Ukraine and the United States, used polls from American organizations to identify issues important to voters here.
The tentacles of the “Translator Project” reached deeply into American political life as at least 80 employees of the Internet Research Agency worked with unwitting Trump supporters to organize rallies, stoke concerns about Clinton’s honesty and health and suppress the turnout of key voting blocs, including African Americans, according to the indictment by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Mueller's indictment specifically names the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Kremlin-linked troll farm, as one of the three controlling entities. That has brought an increased interest in what exactly took place inside the IRA and how Russian operatives so successfully manipulated American sentiment online.
In October, The Washington Post featured a group of Russians working to take down the IRA, including Lyudmila Savchuk.
Savchuk, a 36-year-old single mother of two and a former employee of the Internet Research Agency, won a lawsuit against the troll farm in 2016. Since then, she has detailed the operations of her former employer in numerous publications and videos, served as a witness in another ex-troll’s lawsuit, and sought to get other trolls to tell their stories. She calls it “bringing them into the light.”
“I wanted to take down this factory of lies, and I still do,” said Savchuk, who describes her two months at the agency as an undercover investigation. “But it takes a toll, and it isn’t easy.”
The Post went back to Savchuk (or its interview with Savhcuk) after Friday's indictment emerged.
“The first order of business was not to be unmasked,” said Lyudmila Savchuk, 36, a former employee of the Internet Research Agency who ... was not among those named in the indictment. “Their top specialty was to slip political ideas inside a wrapping that was as human as possible.”
The Washington Post spoke with another former IRA employee - 43-year-old Marat Mindiyarov - over the weekend and posted excerpts of that Q and A.
How did it feel inside?
I arrived there, and I immediately felt like a character in the book “1984” by George Orwell — a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line. The volumes were colossal — there were huge numbers of people, 300 to 400, and they were all writing absolute untruths. It was like being in Orwell’s world.
What sorts of untruths did you write?
My untruths amounted to posting comments. I worked in the commenting department — I had to comment on the news. No one asked me my opinion. My opinions were already written for me, and I had to write in my own words that which I was ordered to write.
(...)
What was the working environment like — was it really like a factory?
There were two shifts of 12 hours, day and night. You had to arrive exactly on time, that is, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. There were production norms, for example, 135 comments of 200 characters each. … You come in and spend all day in a room with the blinds closed and 20 computers. There were multiple such rooms spread over four floors. It was like a production line, everyone was busy, everyone was writing something. You had the feeling that you had arrived in a factory rather than a creative place.
Prior to Mueller's indictment, the New York Times contacted two former employees of the troll factory who described their experiences. The first was Aleksei, who said he was one of the factory's first wave of hires.
... Neither man wanted his full name used, citing the threats and intimidation others have been subjected to for speaking out.
Both left the agency for different reasons — one troubled by the substance of the work, the other struggling with the breakneck pace to create fake content.
(...)
They worked in 12-hour shifts, either day or night, and the assigned topics popped up in their email: President Vladimir V. Putin, or President Barack Obama, or often the two together; Ukraine; the heroism of Russia’s Defense Ministry; the war in Syria; Russian opposition figures; the American role in spreading the Ebola virus.
The key words and subject line were always assigned ...
(...)
Aleksei wrote for the Russian-speaking audience. The English-speaking trolls were kept apart, he said, but from their loud conversations in the communal smoking room, it seemed like they were engaged in similar work.
(...)
Once a blog post was created, the troll exclaimed, “Then the magic began!”
The computers were designed to forward the post to the agency’s countless fake accounts, opening and closing the post to create huge numbers of fake page views.
(...)
After the initial excitement of his new job wore off, Aleksei began to realize that much of the commentary was garbage, with the same themes repeated endlessly. “It was like turning people into zombies by repeating: ‘Everything is good, everything is good. Putin is good, Putin is good,’” he said.
In his nearly two years the staff around him had mushroomed from a few dozen to over 1,000, but by the middle of 2015 he had decided to leave.
The second man the NYT interviewed was Sergei, now a 30-year-old furniture salesman.
“I was 25 years old and knew nothing about politics,” said Sergei, who arranged for a rendezvous in a St. Petersburg food court so that he could confirm from afar that the meeting was with a foreign journalist.
Working in a room with about 40 other people, he received a stream of blog posts by other agency writers. His job was to add comments and to share the posts on other social media platforms. He said everyone had a quota of at least 80 comments and 20 shares a day.
“The main idea was to work on people’s thinking, to raise patriotism among the Russian people and to portray the U.S. negatively,” Sergei said.
The comments were supposed to be original, something he struggled with, particularly as the articles all began to sound identical even if written by different authors. He had a hard time fulfilling his quota, he said. Hired in October 2013, he left in March 2014, he said.
Sergei told the Times the troll job made him more nationalistic and sympathetic towards Russia's fight against the west.
“I began to be more aware of the reasons for the world’s problems,” he said. “I now believe that the world evil is the top elite who control the Federal Reserve system in the United States.”
A former Russian troll speaks: ‘It was like being in Orwell’s world’ (WaPo)
Inside the Russian Troll Factory: Zombies and a Breakneck Pace (NYT)
The 21st-century Russian sleeper agent is a troll with an American accent (WaPo)
The notorious Kremlin-linked ‘troll farm’ and the Russians trying to take it down (NYT)