New world order: Russia’s online propaganda machine turns to ‘Kremlin trolls’

The Kremlin has always dabbled in propaganda, but in the past year its troll campaign has gone into overdrive, adding hundreds of online operatives to help counter outside pressure over its role in the pro-Russian insurgency in eastern Ukraine. The program targets Germany, the United States and other Western powers. One woman, who worked at a St. Petersburg “troll factory” where she and colleagues flooded the Internet with propaganda aimed at stamping President Vladimir Putin’s world vision on Russia and the world, said she had some idea of the Orwellian universe she was entering when she took the job, but underestimated its intensity and scope.

I knew it was something bad, but of course I never suspected that it was this horrible and this large-scale.

Lyuda Savchuk, a 34-year-old journalist who worked in a troll factory

Most of the trolls are young and are attracted by relatively high monthly salaries of 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000). Inside the so-called troll factory in St. Petersburg, a journalist described a room filled with employees sitting shoulder to shoulder and tapping out blog and social media posts promoting the Putin agenda. There has been a new push in recent months to hire more English-speaking trolls as part of an effort to sway public opinion in the United States, the journalist said.

[Russians view the propaganda] and realize that this is a holy land, Obama is a bloody dictator, and true freedom of speech exists only in Russia.

St. Petersburg journalist Andrei Soshnikov

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