Troll army

Troll army or Putinbots are (alongside troll factories and web brigades ; Russian кремлеботы Kremlinbot ) the common names for a covert organization in Russia that manipulates the Internet on behalf of the state . With the help of sock puppets - fake identities - the public mood in online forums and the comment areas of news sites is influenced in the interests of the Russian government .

The appearance of state trolls in Russia was first described in 2003. The general public became aware of them as part of the war in Ukraine from 2013 , as was the case with propaganda by the Russian Federation . The official name for the organization was " Agency for Internet Research " (dt. For Агентство интернет-исследований Agenstwo internet-issledowani ), then " Bundesnachrichtenagentur " (dt. For Федеральное агенетсno Federal now . In the Anglo-Saxon region there is the name Internet Research Agency , IRA for short. In 2015 the name Glavset became known.

organization

In 2003 an article in Westnik magazine (Журнал Вестник) reported on the actions of state-controlled trolls . Anna Poljanskaja, Andrej Kriwow and Iwan Lomko described how the state influences the Internet and how "web brigades" spread the view of the Russian government. The brigades would attract attention through their collective demeanor, the repetition of certain phrases and linguistic peculiarities, discrediting government opponents , Europeans and Americans, and their abrupt activation during elections. The brigades would stick exactly to Vladimir Putin's position. For example, on the occasion of the Kuril conflict and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , the brigades spread anti-Japanese and anti-American messages, but stopped commenting for a long time after Putin reached an agreement with the Japanese government and joined America in the fight against terrorism had shown solidarity. The authors also reported an assignment to accuse Russophobia of anyone who disagreed with Russian policies.

The New York Times reporter Andrian Chen met his research on an operator an early Troll Company, who performed from 2008 works in the interest of the government. The operator stated that there were many such companies and that, to his knowledge, their employees numbered in the thousands. The literary critic and former Moscow city councilor Andrei Malgin had noticed these bloggers since 2010. However, Chen attributed a flourishing of troll activity to the anti-government and anti-Putin protests of 2011.

Individual Russian investigative journalists made a significant contribution to uncovering the troll activities. On September 9, 2013, the government-critical Novaya Gazeta published an article entitled Where do the trolls live? How internet provocateurs work in St. Petersburg and who runs them . According to Novaya Gazeta, the troll factory was registered with the authorities as an association on July 26, 2013. Boris Reitschuster reported to Deutschlandfunk in 2014 that he had seen the rooms of the web brigades with his own eyes. The New York Times reporter Andrian Chen also entered the building as part of a research trip. He was then discredited by the organization as a “CIA agent with contacts to neo-Nazis”.

Because of their headquarters in Olgino , a district of Saint Petersburg , English was referred to as the Trolls from Olgino from 2015 . It is considered certain that the organization will be based in the spring of 2015 after moving to uliza Savushkina 55 in Saint Petersburg. Several hundred freelancers work there; those with the appropriate foreign language skills received more wages - this will certainly be in cash until 2015. In the comment areas and discussion forums of national and international news portals, you operate astroturfing with propaganda by the Russian government , observing and using given keywords . In addition, own “news portals” are operated. According to various sources, the restaurant entrepreneur and Putin confidante Yevgeny Prigozhin with the international nickname “Putin's Koch” is responsible for direct financing.

In an email published by the Russian hacker collective Anonymous International , the work specifications of the employees were explained. According to this, every author must write at least 50 comments on news articles per day and also manage six Facebook and ten Twitter profiles and generate 500 followers within a month (or 2000 on Twitter). Only a fraction of all comments are of a political nature; the rest is used to gain likes and links based on keywords. For this purpose, work is carried out in a team at least within Russia, with different processors taking on different roles: thesis, antithesis and synthesis in a government-friendly form.

Bots take in a further step, the mass " liken " the "right" terms, so that they in the algorithms of search engines to rise higher and in the social media to get maximum attention platforms. In Estonia , robots tweets in Russian during 2017 were nine times higher than human tweets when it came to NATO , a major target of Russian propaganda. In English , the 25 percent Bot accounts produced 46 percent of English-language content. At the same time, the bots began to reverse-use automated processes in the Twitter system . Opponents of the Putin propaganda were flooded with likes in order to clog the account or so that Twitter shut down the account due to suspicious activities. For example, tweets from accounts with only 6 followers were retweeted over 20,000 times by botnets. By choosing suitable keywords, i.e. keywords in the tweet searched for by the bots, the number tripled.

In December 2017, the St. Petersburg business newspaper Delovoy Peterburg reported on the organization's move to a building at Optikov Street 4. The office space has increased from 4,000 square meters to 12,000 square meters. From February 2018, 800 employees should work there.

Former employees

In the summer of 2015, Lyudmila Savchuk filed a wage lawsuit for a symbolic ruble in order to bring the clandestine company to light: the proceedings made the company on record. Savchuk called the hate propaganda and hate speech comments “ extremism ”, which is forbidden in Russia and otherwise arbitrarily used by the authorities to track unpopular media or users of social media; but she would never have heard of the official pursuit of a troll. Savchuk wrote political comments interspersed between reports on everyday affairs under different identities, including the alleged "concern for relatives in Western Europe" and the allegedly devastating effects of the Russian sanctions on European food imports on German farmers. In addition, she had to process certain predefined keywords, e.g. B. she had to write positive things about “Putin”, “Russia's Army”, “Crimea” or “Donbass” and negative things about the “Kiev Junta ”, NATO and Obama . The work rooms in the building on Sawuschkinastraße are constantly under video surveillance and there is an atmosphere of fear among the employees. Most of the employees are young, many of them are students who do the job not out of conviction or an interest in politics, but to earn money. In addition, there are older employees who see their work as a “real mission”.

A former employee told a Dutch journalist that “desperate” pensioners also worked there; in their view, the majority only worked for the money and otherwise did not support government policy. The given political messages would be written between inconsequential "everyday" posts, which, however, would have to be interesting enough to be noticed; Being able to write stories is a prerequisite for a blogger baking cake to be able to convey political content.

The target for Marat Burkhard was 150 pro-government comments per shift, including racist insults against the US president. Degradation of opposition members such as Alexei Navalny , the band Pussy Riot and the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko were part of the daily business. The employees used proxy servers to hide their IP address . Burkhard's salary was 45,000 rubles a month, well above the average earnings in Russia. The wages were always paid in cash. Those who could litter the websites of the BBC or CNN with comments in English received a higher salary; these better-paid international workers would also have a higher status, as they were not only supposed to troll but also intelligently influence opinions; if the comments were too flat, there were even wage deductions. The prerequisite was to know the problems of the target country, these topics were to be observed in the media and to fuel the discussions. The aim was not to bring Russia closer to the Americans. “Our goal was to get the Americans into the mood against their own government. To cause unrest, to cause discontent, to lower Obama's popularity. "

The dropout Olga Malzewa sued the Trollfabrik for damages because the company urged her to quit because of her pregnancy and did not pay her maternity benefits despite her legal entitlement. Her boss tried to convince Malzewa not to go public with her story. He offered her money and later threatened (in a taped phone call) that her revelations would not please some “bad comrades”. From August 2014, Malzowa was employed in the department responsible for blog entries and wrote daily articles about Russia, Ukraine and at times about the war in Syria under different profiles. According to Lyudmila Savchuk's publications, controls have increased, workplaces are monitored, telephone calls are tapped and polygraph tests are carried out. In preparation for the legal action, Malzewa took a picture of the IP address belonging to her workstation. According to the Saint Petersburg newspaper Fontanka.ru, changes were made from this address to a page on which the names, addresses and bank details of oppositional bloggers were collected and belonged to a company associated with Prigozhin.

Known actions

Ukraine war

Especially during the war in Ukraine , Russia-friendly comments on the German-language Internet were in the clear majority, which contradicts the polls and the position of the journalists and representatives of the people who deal with the topic . The Russian interpretation of the war that is prevalent in German Internet forums does not reflect the opinion of the general population; for example, according to a representative survey from 2015, a majority of the Germans surveyed believed Russia to be the main culprit in the war in Ukraine. In comparison, 20% of the Germans surveyed share the Kremlin's point of view, although this reading is particularly widespread among supporters of the Left Party and the AfD . The Süddeutsche Zeitung published strategy papers by the Petersburg Troll Army, which show that trolls were used in the context of the war in Ukraine to fill the comment areas of large news portals with pro-Russian opinions or to disrupt debates on social networks. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a managing director of the agency is said to have confirmed the authenticity of the documents.

International media such as Forbes Magazine and The Guardian reported a similar flood of pro-Kremlin comments . In the comments, the general reporting was often questioned and the blame for the conflict was assigned to “Ukrainian fascists”, the CIA or NATO . Russian involvement in the conflict was either completely questioned or justified by allegations against Ukraine and the West. Independent journalists are usually accused of being corrupt or acting on an undercover mission.

Numerous journalists admitted that this had affected their reporting as they feared hateful reactions to their reports. At the same time, this led to a review of journalistic working methods.

Furthermore, allegedly Ukrainian "information portals" are operated, the content of which is created in St. Petersburg. The data published by the hacker collective Anonymous International shows that Prigozhin financed bloggers in Ukraine even before the annexation of Crimea, for example to the 21 employees of the "Новостное Агентство Харькова" (Eng. "Kharkiv News Agency") with a total of monthly Salaries of about 220,000 rubles.

Agitation in the USA

The protests against Donald Trump in November 2016 in New York City were organized by Russians, according to the special investigator Robert Mueller.

On September 11, 2014, rumors spread on social networks like Twitter and Facebook of an alleged explosion in a chemical plant in the American state of Louisiana . To give the hoax credibility, fake news and Wikipedia pages were set up, short messages were sent to residents, journalists and politicians were written to, and fake videos were posted on YouTube in which the Islamic State allegedly took responsibility for the explosion. It took several hours for the reports and videos to be exposed as fake and to determine that there had been no explosion. Andrian Chen of the New York Times traced the activity of the accounts on social networks back to the Saint Petersburg troll factory. According to Chen, the purpose of the action was to create the impression that the United States had lost control of what was going on in its own country.

Racial hatred was also stoked from Russia: accounts controlled from Russia had called for rallies against Muslims and supporters of Muslims at the same time in identical places.

According to the BBC , the trolls from Saint Petersburg are also behind a video in which a supposedly American soldier shoots the Koran . Videos were also falsified and distributed via social networks to report false reports about an alleged Ebola outbreak in Atlanta .

The organization had bought advertisements on Facebook for $ 100,000 and paid for them in rubles . Depending on the reinforcement effects, around 17 million impressions can be achieved. Michael Flynn , who briefly served as US security advisor under President Trump, followed five Kremlin-controlled Twitter accounts and supported their positions in several cases. According to the NZZ, the goal was to intensify polarization in America before the election.

The congressional committee to monitor the secret services revealed that anti-Muslim protests were organized in St. Petersburg on May 16, 2016 in front of the Islamic Da'wah Center in Houston (Facebook account "Heart of Texas"). At the same time, the trolls organized a counter-protest at the same point (Facebook account “United Muslims of America”) and called on both sides to use violence. Black Americans should also be radicalized in social media with groups organized by Russia. Occupy Wall Street co-founder Micah White reported on attempts by Russia to take over activist groups and emphasized the difference to the mere support of the Occupy movement at the time. He also pointed out that a fake “Black Matters” group could obviously generate more likes than a real movement.

Among other things, the American, left-wing Internet platform CounterPunch was used by the troll factory, according to the FBI , to place articles against the candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election campaign under the cover identity of a freelance journalist by the name of "Alice Donovan" and in this context the alleged ones Emphasize the importance of publishing leaked emails on WikiLeaks .

The special investigator Robert Mueller in the affair of influencing the US election campaign had an indictment drawn up in mid-February 2018, according to which several Russian citizens and organizations connected with the troll army were charged with conspiracy to disrupt the democratic processes in the United States States, including the 2016 presidential election, may be accused of using dishonest means. Including 13 people and numerous front companies that were used with considerable resources for the purpose. The first six people named are:

Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Concord Group,
Mikhail Bystrow, senior staff member who reported to Prigozhin
Michail Burchik, responsible director (planning, infrastructure and personnel)
Aleksandra Krylowa, temporarily third highest employee, information gathering in the USA
Sergei Polosow, IT specialist, responsible for setting up a server structure in the USA for concealing the Russian IP addresses of the troll army
Anna Bogatschowa, data analysis and information gathering in the USA

According to the Washington Post , the Troll Army deployed around 80 employees under the cover name "Translator Project" during the US election campaign in Russia, including appearing as US citizens on American social media with various user accounts, with real supporters Donald Interacting with Trumps, helping organize rallies, and sowing doubts about the honesty and health of candidate Hillary Clinton. The trolls have always limited themselves to exploiting existing areas of conflict in American society and taken up topics from Trump's election campaign.

According to research by the New York Times in February 2018 about the Parkland school massacre, the Russian trolls used a whole range of popular social media, including conspiracy videos on YouTube , fake interest groups on Facebook and a large number of automated Twitter accounts that would be able to control the interpretation Win topics and discussions. During the US election campaign, for example, the Russian trolls established the Twitter feed "@TEN_GOP", which many Americans apparently believed to be an official Twitter account for the Republican Party of Tennessee and which reached 100,000 followers and whose tweets were also from prominent members of the Trump Campaign teams were more widespread.

In December 2018, two independently produced studies of the activities of the IRA were presented, which the authors believe show massive manipulation during the election campaign leading up to the 2016 presidential election in the United States . According to the authors, millions of messages in the social networks that can be assigned to the IRA were evaluated for the analyzes. According to a report in the New York Times , the campaign was particularly aimed at African Americans to be dissuaded from voting for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton .

Angela Merkel's Instagram page

At the beginning of June 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel opened her profile on the Instagram photo portal . According to a government spokeswoman, there were "a few hundred comments in Cyrillic script within a few hours" when the channel started. Most of the Russian-speaking commentators railed against “Ukrainian fascists” and wrote that the people of eastern Ukraine must be saved from “fascism”. A picture in which the Chancellor can be seen with the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was commented on very often in Russian and Merkel assumed a friendship with “the fascists”. In contrast to the negative comments about Ukraine and Germany, Russia and Vladimir Putin received profuse praise. According to the FAS , it is an organized action by Russian Internet trolls. The Moscow Times denies that the comments had anything to do with Putin's troll factories.

Disruption of the French election campaign

As in the American election campaign in 2016 , Russian hackers intervened in the election campaign in France as part of the presidential election: on May 5, 2017, on the eve of the official 40-hour information ban before the second ballot, allegedly compromising data and documents were extracted from the Camp Macrons published, which were massively disseminated on various social networks under the keyword #MacronLeaks or #Macrongate , especially by right-wing American circles (but also by supporters of the Front National ). The accusations and alleged revelations were not picked up by the French media due to the usual pre-election news blackout and ultimately did not have the desired consequences on the election result. The metadata of the published files and documents prove the Russian origin of the hacks; they show a processing by employees of Evrika ZAO, a well-known St. Petersburg subcontractor of the state secret service FSB , who had previously also been noticed by phishing attacks on the CDU.

Brexit

The British Daily Mail reported in early November 2017 exclusively that the troll army had influenced the Brexit referendum from St. Petersburg . According to an anonymous whistleblower , in the days before the referendum the social networks (especially Twitter and Facebook) were deliberately flooded with controversial articles, for example about the account of a fictional German who made fun of the British with 20 tweets an hour . In further reporting, the newspaper portrayed the 23-year-old journalist Vitali Bespalow, who, according to his own statement , worked as a troll in uliza Savuschkina 55 . In total, at least 400 Twitter accounts were used in the campaign. The Daily Telegraph reported with reference to Twitter data that about 3,800 Russian accounts on the day of the referendum a total of 4,400 times the keyword United Kingdom and Gibraltar European Union membership referendum tweeting, 1,100 times under the hashtag #ReasonsToLeaveEU .

Countermovements

As far as we know, some counter-movements organized by civil society are developing against the state disinformation campaigns. The aim is to check the validity of the allegations that are regarded as propaganda or have been seen through and to reveal the means and possibilities of state insists to the media consumer by reviewing the allegations. A fact-checking platform that clears up disinformation is the Stopfake.org portal, which is financed by crowdfunding and the Open Society Foundations and the US National Endowment for Democracy . The organization was founded by students as well as graduates of the Journalism School of the University of Kiev Mohyla Academy in March 2014. It mainly uses publicly accessible media and the Internet to check predetermined or alleged events on both sides. However, this also includes investigative interviews with people from the regions in which the events are said to have taken place. So far there is no knowledge of the influence of such investigative movements.

The Russian project Noodleremover.news has also set itself the task of exposing false reports . The European External Action Service set up the East StratCom Task Force at the end of 2015 in response to ongoing disinformation from Russia . In the weekly newsletter Disinformation Review, the working group compiles examples of disinformation in the Russian media and sheds light on the perspective of government-related media in the newsletter Disinformation Digest.

In the Baltic states , private individuals have teamed up to counteract Russian propaganda about the Baltic states in social media (e.g. on Facebook and vKontakte ) and, above all, in comment columns in news articles. For example, they try to refute claims that Lithuanians are Nazis and that Lithuania is a puppet state of the United States. They organize themselves mainly in Google groups and call themselves “ elves ” to differentiate themselves from “ trolls ”.

At the beginning of November 2017, Novaya Gazeta reported that FAN complained about "censorship" when the search engine operator Google excluded the services associated with it from its results.

Official Russian statements

“We don't do anything like that at the state level,” President Vladimir Putin told journalists on June 1, 2017 about their questions about a possible influence on the 2017 federal election . However, he did not rule out that “patriotic” compatriots could do this.

More troll factories

Reconquista Germanica , German network of right-wing online activists.
newsweb.pl - former Polish troll factory of HGA Medien in Warsaw. The site pretended to be a "news portal" and distributed right-wing fake news with the enemy images of the EU, refugees and Germany. Using social media links, the site achieved a reach of up to seven million views per week. Research by the television station TVN uncovered the troll factory in 2018.

literature

Andrei Soldatov , Irina Borogan: The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries . Public Affairs, New York 2015, ISBN 978-1-61039-573-1 .
Marcel H. Van Herpen: Putin's Propaganda Machine: Soft Power and Russian Foreign Policy , Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, ISBN 978-1-44225-362-9 .

Web links

Official website of ФАН / FAN (Russian)
Friedrich Schmidt: Russian Internet Propaganda: The Trolls of the Kremlin . In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (online edition). 5th August 2015.
Propaganda to order: This is Putin's troll factory - and this is how it works . In: Focus Online . April 5, 2015.
Russian propaganda: Insider reports from the Kremlin's troll factory . In: Spiegel Online . May 29, 2015.

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b Seva Gunitsky: Corrupting the Cyber Commons: social media as a tool of autocratic stability . In: Perspectives and Politics. 13, No. 1, March 2015, pp. 42–54. doi: 10.1017 / S1537592714003120 .
Anna Polyanskaya, Andrey Krivov, Ivan Lomko: Виртуальное око старшего брата. In: vestnik.com , April 30, 2003 (Russian, title translated: Big Brothers virtual eye ).

↑ Alexandra Garmazhapova: Где живут тролли. И кто их кормит. In: Novaya Gazeta , September 7, 2013 (Russian).

↑ Felix-Emeric Tota: Twelve hours a day in Putin's sense. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 19, 2015.

^ One Professional Russian Troll Tells All Radio Liberty / Radio Free Europe, March 25, 2015

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Adrian Chen: The Agency. In: The New York Times , June 2, 2015.

^ Translation difficulties , Kommersant, April 27, 2015

↑ CNN: Internet brigades in Russia - "Web Brigade's" , March 21, 2009; Accusation of Russophobia against everyone who disagrees with them ( Memento of March 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive )

↑ Putin's propaganda. In: arte , September 8, 2015.

↑ Где живут тролли. Как работают интернет-провокаторы в Санкт-Петербурге и кто ими заправляет. Novaya Gazeta, September 9, 2013, accessed December 5, 2019 (Russian).

↑ Jens Rosbach: Putin's secret online army. In: Deutschlandfunk , May 22, 2014.

↑ ^a ^b Tom Parfitt: My life as a pro-Putin propagandist in Russia's secret 'troll factory'. In: The Telegraph , June 24, 2015.

↑ Shaun Walker: Salutin 'Putin: inside a Russian troll house. In: The Guardian , April 2, 2015.

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d Elke Windisch: Putin's Troll Army. In: Der Tagesspiegel , June 11, 2015.

↑ ^a ^b The Russian troll factory at the heart of the meddling allegations , The Guardian, April 2, 2015; "... write 'ordinary posts', about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, ..." (...) Instructions for the political posts would come in "technical tasks" that the trolls received each morning, while the non-political posts had to be thought up personally. "

↑ David Nauer: This is how a troll factory works. In: SRF , February 20, 2017.

↑ Ben Popken, Kelly Cobiella: Russian troll describes work in the infamous misinformation factory. In: NBC , November 16, 2017 (English).

↑ Lee Ferran, Ali Dukakis: Judges side with Mueller, nix Russian joint appeal bid. In: ABC News , August 30, 2018 (English).

↑ Tim Lister, Jim Sciutto, Mary Ilyushina: Exclusive: Putin's 'chef,' the man behind the troll factory. In: CNN , October 18, 2017 (English).

^ Max Seddon: Documents Show How Russia's Troll Army Hit America . In: BuzzFeed , June 2, 2014.

↑ ^a ^b “Putin is brilliant!” In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , April 7, 2015.

↑ Golineh Atai : The Putin-trolls from St. Petersburg. ( Memento from April 15, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) In: Tagesthemen , April 14, 2015.

↑ West failing to tackle Russian hacking and fake news, says Latvia , The Guardian, September 5, 2017

↑ Me, the Robotroll - How Twitter Bots Scatter Russian Propaganda , freiheit.org, Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, September 11, 2017

↑ The surprising new strategy of pro-Russia bots , September 12, 2017

↑ Yevgeny Pregoschin: "Фабрика троллей" перебирается из здания на улице Савушкина в бизнес-центр бывших жертвователей избирательной кампании Путина (dt. The "Troll factory" pulls out of the building in the Sawuschkinastraße in the business center former Putin activists. ) Dp.ru , December 29, 2017.

↑ Jan-Henrik Wiebe: Russia is building its "troll factory" t-online.de, January 11, 2018.

↑ Anna Dolgov: Soldier in Russia's Troll Army Sues Her Ex-Employer. In: The Moscow Times , May 29, 2015 (Russian).

↑ Признание "фабрики троллей". In: fontanka.ru , June 23, 2015 (Russian, title translated: Recognition of the "Troll Factory" ).

↑ Катерина Яковлева: Савчук отсудила у «фабрики троллей» один рубль. В ходе судебного процесса против так называемой "фабрики троллей» Людмила Савчук добилась не только выплаты зарплаты и подписания документов о приеме и увольнении на работу в ООО "Интернет-исследования», но и взыскания моральной компенсации, правда, в размере всего одного рубля. August 17, 2015, accessed on August 18, 2015 (Russian, translation of the title: Savchuk sues "Troll Factory").

↑ Benjamin Bidder: "Dragging these horrors to the public" In: Spiegel Online , May 29, 2015 (interview with Ludmilla Sawtschuk).

↑ https://vimeo.com/242808551 , minute 35; "With us people are arrested for far less".

↑ Putin's troll factory . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , April 7, 2015.

↑ Grensland: Onder het oppervlak (4/8) , vpro , 2015, from 16:20

↑ Propaganda to order: This is Putin's troll factory - and this is how it works. In: Focus , April 5, 2015.

↑ "We had a purpose ... to cause unrest": an interview with a former employee of the "Troll Factory" in St. Petersburg. slon.ru, October 14, 2017

↑ Viktor Resunkow: Побег с "фабрики троллей" (German. Escape from the "troll factory" ). In: Radio Free Europe , September 6, 2016.

↑ Полиция посчитала побитых блогеров . In: Fontanka.ru , September 9, 2016.

↑ Julian Staib: Pro-Russian Comments on the Internet: Where the Opinion Is Made ( Memento of October 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: FAZ, June 20, 2014.

↑ Majority blames Putin for the Ukraine conflict. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 17, 2015.

^ Propaganda from Russia: Putin's trolls . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , June 13, 2014.

↑ Paid pro-Russian trolls try to manipulate social networks and forums . In: Der Standard , June 14, 214.

^ Julian Hans: Putin's trolls. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , June 13, 2014

↑ Interim assessment : The Ukraine conflict in the Tagesschau ( memento from September 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Tagesschau blog, September 29, 2014

^ Bernhard Pörksen : Full load of hatred. In: Die Zeit , November 8, 2014.

↑ City genus: Blogger promoter. Sobaka.ru, February 3, 2015.

↑ Viktor Resunkov: Они любят Путина 12 часов подряд . In: Radio Free Europe, March 14, 2015.

^ Gregg Re: Michael Moore participated in anti-Trump rally allegedly organized by Russians. In: foxnews.com . February 20, 2018, accessed on August 26, 2020.

↑ L. Gordon Grovitz: Putin Trolls the US Internet . In: Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2015.

↑ Columbia Chemical hoax tracked to "troll farm" dubbed the Internet Research Agency . In: News.com.au, June 4, 2015.

↑ Russian Trolls Spread False Information On The Internet . In: NPR, June 4, 2015.

↑ Inside the Russian troll factory where workers earn £ 980 a WEEK to pump out Putin propaganda , The Sun, April 16, 2018

↑ Under the hood by Müller , Nowaja Gaseta , November 2, 2017; “Information about a rally against the 'Islamization of our state' appears on the fake Facebook page 'Heart of Texas'. At the same time, on the wrong side of the United Muslims of America, an appeal was made for a rally by Muslims in support of the study of Islam. The time and place of the two meetings coincide. "

↑ Andrei Soshnikov: Фейковый расстрел: кто стоит за роликом об уничтожении Корана . In: BBC, March 23, 2016.

↑ Julia Smirnova: Hip, young and unscrupulous - these are Putin's trolls . In: Welt Online, May 30, 2016.

↑ Explosions, Ebola: Russian trolls want to cause panic in the USA . In: Der Standard, June 7, 2015.

^ Tools of Russian Influence: Information and Propaganda. In Janne Haaland Matlary and Tormod Heier (eds.): Ukraine and Beyond: Russia's Strategic Security Challenge to Europe. Springer, Cham 2016, ISBN 978-3-319-32530-9 , p. 189 f.

↑ Russian firm tied to pro-Kremlin propaganda advertised on Facebook during election , Washington Post, September 6, 2017

↑ ^a ^b Facebook reveals fake accounts again , NZZ, July 31, 2018

↑ Russia's Facebook Fake News Could Have Reached 70 Million Americans , thedailybeast.com, September 8, 2017

↑ Michael Flynn Followed Russian Troll Accounts, Pushed Their Messages in Days Before Election Daily Beast, November 1, 2017

↑ Natasha Bertrand: Russia organized 2 sides of a Texas protest and encouraged 'both sides to battle in the streets' Business Insider, November 1, 2017.

^ I started Occupy Wall Street. Russia tried to co-opt me , The Guardian, November 2, 2017

↑ Exclusive: Fake black activist accounts linked to Russian government , CNN, September 28, 2017

↑ "Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options" Washington Post, December 25, 2017

↑ FBI / NYT: "Read the Special Counsel's Indictment Against the Internet Research Agency and Others" New York Times, February 16, 2018

↑ Anton Troianovski, Rosalind S. Helderman, Ellen Nakashima and Craig Timberg: "The 21st-century Russian sleeper agent is a troll with accent to American" Washington Post, February 17, 2018

↑ Sheera Frenkel, Daisuke Wakabayashi: After Florida School Shooting, Russian 'Bot' Army Pounced. In: NYT , February 19, 2018 (English).

↑ Markus Böhm: This is revealed by two new studies on Russia's propaganda. In: Spiegel Online , December 18, 2018.