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I investigated millions of tweets from the Kremlin’s ‘troll factory’ and discovered classic propaganda techniques reimagined for the social media age
Tailored messaging, repeated exposure, and false grassroots campaigns are classic propaganda techniques, now used widely by state-back trolls.
According to previous whistleblowers, who started shedding light on the organisation in 2015, most agency employees were young people, often students, recruited through public job adverts, with applicants undergoing interviews involving English language and “political knowledge” tests. The trolls’ engagement with conspiracy theories spanned far-right (QAnon, “evil elites” manipulating the public) and far-left (The Grayzone, US government using COVID for profit) fringe communities, as well as general concerns across the political spectrum, such as the invasion of privacy by the state and the erosion of civil liberties. For Russian-speaking audiences, the trolls downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic at home while focusing on perceived failures of the US and the west, highlighting Russia’s economic resilience and avoiding health-related terms like infektsiya(“infection”) and profilaktika(“prevention”).
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