Inside the troll factory: meet the former Russian internet agitators who say Mueller’s indictments are on target
‘The most important principle of the work is to have an account like a real person. They create real characters’
While Russian officials scoff at a US indictment charging 13 Russians with meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, several people who worked at the same St Petersburg “troll factory” say they think the criminal charges are well-founded.
Marat Mindiyarov, a former commenter at the innocuously named Internet Research Agency, says the organisation’s Facebook department hired people with excellent English skills to sway US public opinion through an elaborate social media campaign.
His own experience at the agency makes him trust the US indictment, Mindiyarov said. “I believe that that’s how it was and that it was them,” he said.
The federal indictment issued Friday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller names a businessman linked to President Vladimir Putin and a dozen other Russians. It alleges that Yevgeny Prigozhin – a wealthy restaurateur dubbed “Putin’s chef,” paid for the internet operation that created fictitious social media accounts and used them to spread tendentious messages.
The aim of the factory’s work was either to influence voters or to undermine their faith in the US political system, the 37-page indictment states.