RUSSIAN TROLLS SOUGHT TO DISINFORM THE AMERICAN PUBLIC

Sinister scheme of Russian ‘Troll Farm’ laid bare in federal grand jury indictment

By James Varney - The Washington Times - Saturday, February 17, 2018

Accounts from as far back as 2014 described a “Troll Factory” in St. Petersburg where Russian tycoon Evgeny Prighozin, a longtime crony of President Vladimir Putin, reportedly began buttressing the regime of the former KGB spymaster and eventually morphed into a sprawling operation with international targets.

On Friday a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., returned a 37-page indictment detailing just how involved the operation became in the 2016 presidential election.

Some “Factory” workers have described the place as one where tech operatives beavered away in a college-paper like atmosphere, all the while earning good money. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors, on the other hand, gave it a decidedly sinister sheen in court papers, describing “a Russian organization engaged in operations to interfere with elections and political processes.”

Alan Baskayev, who pretended to be any number of Americans on social-media platforms, told the Moscow Times last October it was all something of a lark at which he made more than $850 a month.

“We were engaged in the ugliest things that only 20-year-old very cheerful lads — who perfectly understand what amusing place they found themselves in — could do,” he told the English language organ published in Russia’s capital. “Like everyone, I needed the money. I decided it was an excellent bargain, considering that the conscience played no part in it at all.”

Mr. Baskayev was not named in Friday’s indictment. But most of the 13 people who were named are allegedly among the 80 “trolls” toiling in an operation that dropped more than $1.2 million a month stirring up trouble in the U.S.

Although the “Factory” opened shop in 2014, long before Hillary Clinton formally announced her candidacy and before Donald Trump was even imagined as a candidate, prosecutors say by the time Election Day 2016 neared, the Russian activities were clearly designed to help Mr. Trump and hurt Mrs. Clinton.

Authorities noted there does not appear any Americans willfully or knowingly participated in the “Factory’s” dubious work. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein stressed “there is no allegation that the charge altered the outcome of the 2016 election.”

Nevertheless, the extensive operation described in the indictment largely put to rest any notion Russians were not meddling in U.S. politics. All defendants were charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, while five were hit with identity theft and three with wire and bank fraud charges.

Serious stuff, and far removed from the almost playful tone in which Mr. Baskayev and others described their work, pretending to be a “redneck from Kentucky,” or “a white guy from Minnesota,” or an “African-American from New York.”

But those false identities weren’t simply humorous lampoons, according to the indictment. Mr. Prighozin’s rubles also allegedly funded trips to America in which operatives — the indictment accused Aleksandra Yuryevna Krylova and Anna Vladislavovna Bogocheva as being two of them — “collected intelligence.”

Said “intelligence” would late color the bogus organizations “Factory” trolls pushed on social media platforms and their supposedly legit rallies in the U.S.

Back in 2015, before the first votes were even cast in the party primaries, the New York Times described “The Agency,” shorthand for “the Internet Research Agency,” now one of the federal defendants. From an unassuming building in St. Petersburg, handsomely compensated trolls tried “to wreak havoc all around the Internet.”

These weren’t spirited pranks but a “highly coordinated disinformation campaign,” the Times reported. The trolls didn’t simply throw up Facebook posts, they hijacked Twitter feeds with fake stories of chemical accidents, Ebola cases, or police shootings.

All the bogus incidents, of course, were linked to genuine events that had riled millions of Americans, and the Russian trolls knew how to push political hot buttons among their U.S. audience.

Working at the “Agency” wasn’t exactly fun — the Times told the story of a former troll who burned out on 12-hour days in which she had to hit rigorous targets for posts and comments around the Internet — and originally it was designed more to help Putin and his regime than harm foreign political markets.

The indictment, however, alleges the trolls’ target changed.

The goal became to “sow discord in the U.S. political system.” With fake Black Lives Matter posts and stolen identities, “hundreds” of trolls with budgets in the millions worked at that task relentlessly, according to the indictment.

The “Factory” itself called this “information warfare against the United States,” the indictment reads. The war allegedly unfolded on myriad fronts: Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

And while the offensives eventually sought to “support” Trump’s campaign and “disparage” Clinton’s, the alleged conspiracy’s overarching goal was broader: “impairing, obstructing and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the United States by dishonest means in order to enable the Defendants to interfere with U.S. political and electoral processes, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/17/workings-russias-troll-farm-detailed-federal-grand/?