Robert Mueller investigation: What is a Russian troll farm?

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's indictment issued Friday charging Russian nationals and businesses with interfering in the 2016 presidential election does not use the ominous term "troll farm," but that's at the heart of investigation.

While you may know that troll farms in some way involve the manipulation of social media to some possible dastardly end, you may not know how they actually work.

What is a troll farm?

The name comes from the term "troll," which is someone who joins a social media discussion on Facebook or Twitter, for example, and posts provocative comments, perhaps inflammatory or even off the topic, to sow discord.

A "troll farm" is an organized operation of many users who may work together in a "factory" or from different places across a distributed network to generate online traffic aimed at affecting public opinion, and to spread misinformation and disinformation.

The indictment issued Friday specifically mentions the Internet Research Agency, which as far back as 2014 had been using social media accounts in the U.S. (The New York Times Magazine reported on the organization in 2015.)

The Internet Research Agency, based in Olgino, a part of St. Petersburg, Russia, had about 200 to 300 people working, the indictment says, about 80 of which were focused on the U.S.

The group operated "social media accounts that look like Americans who then try and push or influence Americans into believing things that the Russian government wants," said Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Also the troll farm sent Russians to the U.S. to set up "the technical infrastructure to make it look like there were real American accounts," being used in the operation, he said.

That meant maintaining computer services connected to the Internet to create a virtual private network that the agency could dial into in the U.S. from Russia.

"It allows them to interact with a server in the United States and that server is doing all the social media activity, so it looks like all the accounts are in the U.S. when, in fact... they are being operated sort of through an encrypted tunnel back through to Russia," said Jeff Hemsley, assistant professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and co-author of the book Going Viral.
This operation began to function in the U.S. in 2014, the indictment says. But troll farms are not new.

The idea of "click farms," where low-paid workers attempt to skew social media traffic ands ratings has been discussed for more than five years. "I think there's always been people who try to exploit systems," Hemsley said. "It's likely that as long as there's been social media there's been people trying to scam other people."

Source: king5 News