But in opinion of Russian reporter, U.S. list ‘random’
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — While Russian officials scoff at a U.S. indictment charging 13 Russians with meddling in the 2016 U.S. 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 Internet Research Agency, said the organization’s Facebook department hired people with excellent English skills to sway U.S. public opinion through an elaborate social media campaign.
The federal indictment, issued Friday, 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.
Mindiyarov said he took a job at the troll factory in late 2014 because he was unemployed and curious. Most of the operation focused on the separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine and Western sanctions against Russia, not political races in the West, he said.
After only a couple of months, Mindiyarov quit. He said he hated the work.
“The world in those comments was divided into black and white: America was bad; Putin was good,” he said. “They praised whatever had to do with Putin and criticized anything related to America, ‘gay’ Europe, and so on. That was the principle of the work.”
Another former worker at the St. Petersburg workshop, Lyudmila Savchuk, also described it as an efficient venture that churned out posts around the clock.
“The most important principle of the work is to have an account like a real person,” Savchuk said. “They create real characters, choosing a gender, a name, a place of living and an occupation. Therefore, it’s hard to tell that the account was made for the propaganda.”
While the U.S. indictment mentioned 13 people, many more must have been involved in the effort, according to Savchuk.
“Here they laugh about the news that 13 people could influence the elections in the U.S., but there were many more people doing that,” she said. “These technologies are unbelievably effective.”
Andrey Zakharov, an investigative journalist with Russian outlet RBC who co-reported an investigation of the troll factory, said the list of indicted Russians looked “quite random” to him.
“They simply included in it all the names they could find,” Zakharov said. “According to our information, some of these people don’t work at the factory now and did not even work there during the (U.S.) elections. This does not look like a result of a solid investigation.”