Russian troll admits US ‘information war’

A FORMER employee of the Russian “troll factory” that bought thousands of Facebook adverts during the US presidential election has revealed how he wrote comments on Western news sites to ridicule Hillary Clinton and inflame political divisions.

A young man quoted under the pseudonym “Maksim” told independent Russian channel TV Rain about the trolls’ mission to meddle in US politics and wage an “information war” against the country. “Our goal was to set Americans against their own government,” he said. “To provoke unrest, provoke dissatisfaction.”

Maksim’s records listed his employer as the Internet Research Agency, the “troll factory” in St Petersburg that Facebook said had purchased 3,000 adverts around the time of the election, reaching 10million people with politically-charged content.

Maksim and the trolls in his department made 50,000 roubles (£650) a month posting tens of thousands of comments on Western media sites such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, he said.

They would receive spreadsheets with links to articles and instructions on “what we needed to write about them to blow up the discussion”.

Across from his workspace was the Facebook department, which created fake groups and left hundreds of English-language comments every shift.

Facebook sometimes banned their accounts, he said, suggesting it was aware of the trolls as early as 2014.