My life as a troll –

Lyudmila Savchuk’s story

For two months, Lyudmila Savchuk was employed by the ‘Internet Research Agency‘ in Saint Petersburg, which in reality was a troll factory. Here she talks about her experiences as a troll.

– My name is Lyudmila; I am a journalist and I live in Saint Petersburg. A while ago I started to get interested in so-called troll factories, and I decided to investigate the phenomenon from the inside. In early 2015, I managed to get a job at one of the factories.

My road to the factory

I was offered the job by a former colleague of mine, who I had worked with on a local newspaper. Before I got the job, I began posting more neutral messages on my social media profiles and fewer of the activist messages I had been posting before. Then ads started to appear in my feed, looking for educated Russians who wanted to work in ‘the creative industry’.

My former colleague told me what the ads were about and got me the job. She told me that it was a secret project at a secret location and for a secret organisation which I was not allowed to talk about. Later she used to joke that Peter the Great opened the gateway to Europe by founding Saint Petersburg, and through this gateway we were now pouring shit into the minds of Europeans. It is sad, but Russian journalists have split into two camps, and she was now working with propaganda.

24 hours a day

I started work on 2 January 2015 and I was there for two months. The troll factory was situated at 55, Savuchkina Street in Saint Petersburg, in a building that has since become known in the media. Read more

The company was called the ‘Internet Research Agency’. It was a large, modern office building, with every room filled with people and computers. When you first arrive at the building, you get the impression that there are so many people and computers, and that there is activity 24 hours a day. There is a day shift, working from 9 in the morning to 9 in the evening and a night shift from 9 to 6 the next morning. There are always a few hundred people at work, so the factory runs the whole time.

Article screendump St. Petersburg troll farm

The employees are active in every little corner of the web, even on sites that are not much visited, and they produce all kinds of content – comments, photos and videos. On all of the computers there is a list of the topics the trolls are to focus on that day. This could be the US, the EU and European values, Putin, or the Russian Defence Ministry and the Defence Minister. During the time I worked at the factory, a central task was to spread negative publicity on Ukraine.

Fake profiles

Depending on your role and English skills, you may be given different tasks – for instance, you will be asked to blog or comment on news articles. At the bottom of the hierarchy there are people commenting on posts on social media. This is done from fake profiles, and there are whole teams of employees dedicated to creating these profiles. The more interesting a fake profile looks and the less political it appears on the surface the more work has usually been put into creating it.

Employees almost never read the things they comment on. They get the articles through links and scroll straight to the bottom and enter the comments they have been told to. The instructions are also on the computer, so if you do not know what opinion to express in any given case, you can open a folder and read it there.

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On all of the computers there is a list of the items the trolls are to focus on that day.

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The more interesting a fake profile looks and the less political it appears on the surface the more work has usually been put into creating it.

‘A good man like

Sergei Shoigu’

One could say that the trolls’ main task is to give what they write a human touch – write it so there seems to be a genuine politically engaged person sitting at the screen. For example, I was told at the start that I should write something like ‘I was in my kitchen baking, and I was thinking how Putin is doing a really good job.’ It was a regular part of the job to write posts in which you praised Putin – and Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.

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For example, I was told at the start that I should write something like ‘I was in my kitchen baking, and I was thinking how Putin is doing a really good job’.

You might write from a fake profile as an ordinary woman that ‘I would like to meet a good man, someone like Sergei Shoigu’ – and then mention how great it was that he had just ordered new fighter planes.

After I left the troll factory, I published material from there and I have since told my story to the world. The state-controlled media have naturally accused me of all sorts of things – from being a CIA agent to being a sexual pervert – but I was prepared for that. I think we need to act to stop this kind of propaganda, and that is what I am working for now.