By IULIIA SUBBOTOVSKA,
Last Updated: Friday, May 29, 2015
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- (AP)
Deep inside a four-story marble building in St. Petersburg, hundreds of
workers tap away at computers on the front lines of an information war,
say those who have been inside. Known as "Kremlin trolls," the men and
women work 12-hour shifts around the clock, flooding the Internet with
propaganda aimed at stamping President Vladimir Putin's world vision on
Russia, and the world.
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 Western pressure over its
role in the pro-Russian insurgency in eastern Ukraine. The program is
drawing Serbia away from its proclaimed EU membership path and closer to
the Russian orbit, and is targeting Germany, the United States and
other Western powers. The operation has worried the European Union
enough to prompt it to draw up a blueprint for fighting Russia's
disinformation campaign, although details have not yet been released.
Lyuda
Savchuk, a single mother with two children, worked in the St.
Petersburg "troll factory" until mid-March. The 34-year-old journalist
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," she said in an interview in her
apartment, which has colorful drawings on the walls for her two
preschool-age children.
She described how the trolls manage several
social media accounts under different nicknames, such as koka-kola23,
green_margo and Funornotfun. Those in her department had to bash out 160
blog posts during a 12-hour shift. Trolls in other departments flooded
the Internet with doctored images and pro-Putin commentary on news
stories that crop up on Russian and Western news portals.
In some
departments, she said, the trolls receive daily talking points on what
to write and what emotions to evoke. "It seems to me that they don't
know what they are doing," Savchuk said. "They simply repeat what they
are told."
She said 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).
Her descriptions of the work coincide with those of other
former trolls who have spoken publicly, although Savchuk is one of the
few willing to have her full name published. She quit after a little
more than two months, after finding she couldn't stand being part of a
propaganda machine.
The trolls are employed by Internet Research,
which Russian news reports say is financed by a holding company headed
by Putin's friend and personal chef. Those who have worked there say
they have little doubt that the operation is run from the Kremlin.
St.
Petersburg journalist Andrei Soshnikov, who was one of the first to
report on the "troll factory," said about 400 people work in the
building. A video he posted on YouTube this spring gave a rare glimpse
inside the building; in one room trolls were shown sitting
shoulder-to-shoulder at their computers. The operation moved into the
building when it expanded in March 2014, the month Russia seized Crimea
from Ukraine and provoked the first round of Western economic sanctions.
Soshnikov,
a reporter at the weekly Moi Rayon, or My Region, said 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.
"All of a
sudden, (they) switch on Russia Today and realize that this is a holy
land, Obama is a bloody dictator and true freedom of speech exists only
in Russia."
In Serbia, trolls are recruited through several small
right-wing parties that are both financially and politically supported
by Russia, media analysts say.
When Russian opposition leader Boris
Nemtsov was killed in Moscow in late February, the Serbian trolls were
quick to react. "Who is to gain from this assassination but America? It
must have been CIA," was the dominant mantra that took hold in
discussions on Serbian news sites. "Likes" went into the hundreds, while
comments such as "Putin is responsible" received widespread ridicule.
Serbs
receive most of their information about Russia from Moscow-backed
media, and the trolls reinforce the Kremlin line. The result is a
widespread view in Serbia that the Kiev regime is neo-Nazi and that
Putin was right to annex Crimea.
"One of the consequences is the fact
that popular support for the EU integration has dropped below 50
percent for the first time since democratic change in Serbia in 2000,"
said Jelena Milic, a political analyst at the Center for Euro-Atlantic
Studies, in Belgrade. "It is going to be very hard to recover this
public support."
In Germany, the foreign ministry has tried to
counter the propaganda by issuing a memo to its diplomats on how to
debunk some of the standard Russian arguments about the Ukraine
conflict.
For instance, the memo answers the statement that "fascists
are in power in Kiev" by noting that radical and far-right groups made
up only a small proportion of the demonstrators who ousted the
Russia-friendly president, and that far-right parties did very poorly in
subsequent parliamentary and presidential elections.
_____
Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade, Serbia and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.
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