Inside the “Ministry of Truth”

Its employees call it the “Ministry of Truth”: Since last year, global media have been covering the troll factory in Saint Petersburg.

Chemical disasters, Ebola and Dutch terror
Under the official name “Internet Research Agency,” hundreds of employees are paid for spreading pro-Kremlin messaging on social networks or in the comment sections of news sites. Radio Liberty has now spoken with the third whistleblower from the agency, Olga Maltseva, who stepped up last week.

The agency also stands behind successful disinformation about an alleged chemical disaster in the US state of Louisana or about an alleged spread of Ebola in Atlanta. Earlier this year, the trolls tried to influence the Dutch referendum on the EU’s Association Agreement with Ukraine with a fake video containing a terror threat against the Dutch.

Offered money to say silent
“When the situation in Syria became worse, [we had to write] a lot about Syria. But still, mostly it was about Ukraine,” Ms Maltseva describes her job, which was writing blog posts. She also helped to reveal some details that established a link between the troll factory and attacks on Russian opposition activists.

Ms Maltseva also had a very interesting conversation with her former boss, after it became clear she wants to talk publicly about her job. “He offered me money for being silent, not to tell anything [about the agency] on the internet. They told me that I will be turned into some kind of vicious opposition activist, that I was stupid to be led to this, and that I do not need this. ‘You will have a family soon, why would you need such a fuss,’ they said.”

If you want to know why the employees of the “Ministry of Truth” are investigated on polygraph; why Maltseva had trouble getting paid; or why she sues the agency, read the full article by Radio Free Europe here (in Russian).

Further reading on pro-Kremlin trolls

• The daily work of trolls: 12 hours a day, 135 comments per shift, 200 characters per comment, for 45.000 rubles (€615) a month. Read the interview with former troll Marat Burkhard (in English).

• When Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was killed, the trolls were told to stop working on everything else, and to focus on spreading disinformation about who killed the opposition politician – blaming the Ukrainians, the Americans, or the Russian opposition activists themselves. The Lithuanian film War 2020 sheds light on this (in English).

• Russian paper Novaya Gazeta describes the instructions for trolls in more detail (in Russian).

• The study by NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence “Internet trolling as a tool of hybrid warfare: the case of Latvia” analyses trolling and its different forms (in English).

• Award-winning Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro investigated how pro-Russia trolls manipulate Finns online (in English).