| | | Do you know Lyudmila, comrade?
A Russian 'troll slayer' went undercover at a troll factory and found that hundreds of Russians were working as paid trolls in rotating shifts
Charles Maynes,
PRI's The World
Mar. 18, 2019, 4:13 PM
 Hackers take part at a Cybersecurity Conference to strengthen the fight against cybercrime. Michel Spingler/AP
"Troll slayer" and journalist Lyudmila Savchuk when undercover at a troll factory for two and a half months to see how it works.Savchuk found that the organization was broken up into departments: "news division," the "social media seeders", and a group dedicated to producing visual memes known as " demotivators."The operation was run by a local restaurateur who was placed under US sanctions for attempting to interfere with US elections.Savchuk believed her work would help Facebook understand how its platform could be gamed, but no longer believes the fight against trolls is winnable.
When a journalist heard a bot organization was hiring writers, she went for it. Slaying online trolls can be a lonely business. Just ask Russia's Lyudmila Savchuk, who first exposed the story of Russia's disinformation campaign back in 2014.
The journalist and 33-year-old mother of two, Savchuk started noticing websites and social media accounts attacking local opposition activists in her hometown of Saint Petersburg with a frequency she hadn't seen before.
The posts were all too similar. The verbal assaults too coordinated. So, when Savchuk later heard that an organization rumored to be behind the campaign — the Internet Research Agency or IRA — was hiring writers, she went for it.
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