The Trolls Who Came In From The Cold
▻http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-trolls-headquarters-media-internet-insider-account/26904157.html
Last May, Tatiana N decided she wanted a higher salary than the average journalist can expect.
After responding to an advertisement in the popular HeadHunter job-search website, she became a Kremlin-paid Internet troll. Tatiana — who, like others interviewed for this story, asked that her last name not be used — worked out of a 2,500-square-meter warehouse in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.
The job paid 40,000 rubles a month, significantly more than the 25,000-30,000 most journalists make. But it came, she said, “with pain.”
Tatiana joined a round-the-clock operation in which an army of trolls disseminated pro-Kremlin and anti-Western talking points on blogs and in the comments sections of news websites in Russia and abroad.
The operation, Internet Research, is financed through a holding company headed by President Vladimir Putin’s “personal chef,” Evgeny Prigozhin.
“So you write, write, write, from the point of view of anyone,” Tatiana, 22, says.
“You could be [posing as] a housewife who bakes dumplings and suddenly decides: ’I have an opinion about what Putin said! And this action by Vladimir Vladimirovich saves Russia.”
The roughly 400 employees work 12-hour shifts and are split into various departments. Some focus on writing up themes and assignments, others concentrate on commenting, and others work on graphics for social media.
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Internet Research, which is officially run by a retired police colonel named Mikhail Bystrov, was first exposed as a “#troll_farm” by the Independent Novaya Gazeta weekly newspaper in late 2013.
The hierarchical structure, former employees say, is as opaque as the makeup of the Russian bureaucracy itself.
Les éléments de langage (en russe) du 28 février au 7 mars mis en ligne font 199 pages… ▻https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByghjF4C91znZlJXWFNtWEkzeGs
