Alexei wrote for the Russian-speaking audience. The English-speaking trolls were kept apart, he said, but from their loud conversations in the communal smoking room, it seemed like they were engaged in similar work.

The English speakers discussed the best time to post commentary to attract an American audience, he remembered, and bragged about creating thousands of fake social media accounts.

Alexei was interviewed before the indictments were handed up, and he cut off contact within days of the interview.

He had said that he did not know much about the company management and that he had never seen Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the man the United States accused of creating the agency and nicknamed "Putin's cook" because he got his start in the restaurant and catering business.

The former troll did identify Dzheykhun N.O. Aslanov — called "Jay" around the firm — as the head of the trolls running the coverage of the U.S. elections, an assertion that Aslanov has denied.

Alexei said that two departments generated articles and tweets in English. On the Russian side of things, he said, the main thread running through the blog posts and the commentary was that "life was good" in Russia "under Putin and it was bad in the US under Obama".

On domestic issues, opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny was a favorite target. The Russian annexation of Crimea was always presented as an historical achievement for Putin that opened new horizons for Russia.

"If things were not great before, now we would start living really well," was the general theme, he said.

Once a blog post was created, the troll exclaimed, "Then the magic began!"

The computers were designed to forward the post to the agency's countless fake accounts, opening and closing the post to create huge numbers of fake page views.

After the initial excitement of his new job wore off, Alexei began to realise that much of the commentary was garbage, with the same themes repeated endlessly. "It was like turning people into zombies by repeating: 'Everything is good, everything is good. Putin is good, Putin is good,'" he said.

In his nearly two years, the staff around him had mushroomed from a few dozen to over 1,000, but by the middle of 2015 he had decided to leave.

The work began to trouble him. "If I went first because they paid a lot of money for nothing, when I left I started to understand what I was doing and it was bad," he said.

Not everyone had the same reaction, he noted. Some seemed brainwashed by the material. "They became cheerleaders for the regime," he said.

Sergei, 30, now a furniture salesman, was one of those.

With only a high school education, he was thrilled to discover that he could earn good money — he said he was actually handed cash in an envelope for part of his weekly salary — without much effort.

"I was 25 years old and knew nothing about politics," said Sergei, who arranged for a rendezvous in a St. Petersburg food court so that he could confirm from afar that the meeting was with a foreign journalist.

Working in a room with about 40 other people, he received a stream of blog posts by other agency writers. His job was to add comments and to share the posts on other social media platforms. He said everyone had a quota of at least 80 comments and 20 shares a day.

"The main idea was to work on people's thinking, to raise patriotism among the Russian people and to portray the US negatively," Sergei said.

The comments were supposed to be original, something he struggled with, particularly as the articles all began to sound identical even if written by different authors. He had a hard time fulfilling his quota, he said. Hired in October 2013, he left in March 2014, he said.

The job changed him.

"Of course I became more patriotic," he said. He realised, he said, just how much Russia had to struggle against foreign powers, mostly the United States, who sought to control its natural resources.

From the blog posts, Sergei said he learned that just a few families like the Rockefellers, the Morgans and the Rothschilds controlled much of the wealth in the United States, and that their banks charged rapacious interest rates.

"I began to be more aware of the reasons for the world's problems," he said. "I now believe that the world evil is the top elite who control the Federal Reserve system in the United States."

Reached by telephone after the indictments were announced, Sergei said he had not heard about them.

Alexei said that ultimately, the managers demanded that the trolls do more and more by rote, even as the audience seemed to grow more jaded and paid less attention to what they wrote.

"If there was some creativity at the beginning," he said, "by the end that creative part was gone and we were all like robots."

New York Times

Sound like anyone here?

longweekend58 wrote on Feb 21^st, 2018 at 9:19am:




You - Longy -
once claimed to be paid $5 per post by the Liberal party
to write anti-labor party posts here on Ozpolitic.

longweekend58 wrote on Feb 21^st, 2018 at 11:36am:


How stupid was the poster who said it?

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION.

longweekend58 wrote on Feb 21^st, 2018 at 12:14pm:



You admitted it alright.
I can't find it just now.

It makes sense as you're now against conservative values
by going against Trump 10 times a day.
How much are you paid for that?

You're a mercenary up to the highest bidder.

Aussie wrote on Feb 21^st, 2018 at 2:24pm:



But how can you explain his support for far right conservatives here but
his non- support for the same in the USA?