page_title: Russian web brigades
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Russian web brigades / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Protest against the presidency of Donald Trump in Manhattan on 12 November 2016. Thousands of protesters marched from Union Square to Trump Tower (about 40 blocks).
context_page_description: The web brigades, also known as Russia's troll army, Russian bots, Putinbots, Kremlinbots, troll factory, Lakhta trolls or troll farms, are state-sponsored anonymous Internet political commentators and trolls linked to the Russian government. Participants report that they are organized into teams and groups of commentators that participate in Russian and international political blogs and Internet forums using sockpuppets, social bots and large-scale orchestrated trolling and disinformation campaigns to promote pro-Putin and pro-Russian propaganda. It has also been found that articles on Russian Wikipedia concerning the MH17 crash and the 2014 Ukraine conflict were targeted by Russian internet propaganda outlets.
context_section_description: State sponsored online sockpuppetry and manipulation of online views is practiced by several countries, in particular by United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom, Israel, Turkey, Iran, Vietnam, India, Serbia and Ukraine.
  The earliest documented allegations of the existence of "web brigades" appear to be in the April 2003 Vestnik Online article "The Virtual Eye of Big Brother" by French journalist Anna Polyanskaya (a former assistant to assassinated Russian politician Galina Starovoitova) and two other authors, Andrey Krivov and Ivan Lomako. The authors claim that up to 1998, contributions to forums on Russian Internet sites (Runet) predominantly reflected liberal and democratic values, but after 2000, the vast majority of contributions reflected totalitarian values. This sudden change was attributed to the appearance of teams of pro-Russian commenters who appeared to be organized by the Russian state security service. According to the authors, about 70% of Russian Internet posters were of generally liberal views prior to 1998–1999, while a surge of "antidemocratic" posts (about 60–80%) suddenly occurred at many Russian forums in 2000. This could also be a reflection to the fact that access to Internet among the general Russian population soared during this time, which was until then accessible only to some sections of the society.
  In January 2012, a hacktivist group calling itself the Russian arm of Anonymous published a massive collection of email allegedly belonging to former and present leaders of the pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi (including a number of government officials). Journalists who investigated the leaked information found that the pro-Kremlin movement had engaged in a range of activities including paying commentators to post content and hijacking blog ratings in the fall of 2011. The e-mails indicated that members of the "brigades" were paid 85 rubles (about US$3) or more per comment, depending on whether the comment received replies. Some were paid as much as 600,000 roubles (about US$21,000) for leaving hundreds of comments on negative press articles on the internet, and were presented with iPads. A number of high-profile bloggers were also mentioned as being paid for promoting Nashi and government activities. The Federal Youth Agency, whose head (and the former leader of Nashi) Vasily Yakemenko was the highest-ranking individual targeted by the leaks, refused to comment on the authenticity of the e-mails.
  In 2013, a Freedom House report stated that 22 of 60 countries examined have been using paid pro-government commentators to manipulate online discussions, and that Russia has been at the forefront of this practice for several years, along with China and Bahrain.  In the same year, Russian reporters investigated the St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency, which employs at least 400 people. They found that the agency covertly hired young people as "Internet operators" paid to write pro-Kremlin postings and comments, smearing opposition leader Alexei Navalny and U.S. politics and culture.
  Each commenter was to write no less than 100 comments a day, while people in the other room were to write four postings a day, which then went to the other employees whose job was to post them on social networks as widely as possible.
   
  Some Russian opposition journalists state that such practices create a chilling effect on the few independent media outlets remaining in the country.
  Further investigations were performed by Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and Institute of Modern Russia in 2014–15, inspired by the peak of activity of the pro-Russian brigades during the Ukrainian conflict and assassination of Boris Nemtsov. The effort of using "troll armies" to promote Putin's policies is reported to be a multimillion-dollar operation. According to an investigation by the British Guardian newspaper, the flood of pro-Russian comments is part of a coordinated "informational-psychological war operation". One Twitter bot network was documented to use more than 20,500 fake Twitter accounts to spam negative
caption: Protest against Donald Trump in New York City that was allegedly organized by Russians indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.[32]
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