Internet Research Agency

The agency was first mentioned in a 2015 article by Adrian Chen in The New York Times,[4] which detailed its operations, although it gained further attention in when Russian journalist Andrey Zakharov published his investigation into Prigozhin’s "troll factory".

The extent to which the agency tried to influence public opinion using social media became better known after a June 2014 BuzzFeed News article greatly expanded on government documents published by hackers earlier that year.

[11][12][13] Revealed on 16 August 2012 in an article by the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, the website for the company Medialogia[b] offered a system known as Prisma terminals (Russian: Терминалы «Призма») which, according to Farit Khusnoyarov,[c] Prism could track for the Kremlin in near real time the stand-alone blog platforms and social networks of nearly 60 million sites and could analyze the tone of the statements of each of these sources with a lag of several minutes or given as an estimated error of 2–3% almost in real time.

Others using Prisma include Sergei Naryshkin's office in the State Duma, senior officials at the Main Center for Communications and Information Security (Russian: Главный центр связи и информационной безопасности) in the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD)[e] senior officials at Moscow City Hall[f] and employees close to the head of Rosneft Igor Sechin.

[27] Uncovered by Anonymous International and made public in June 2014, Vyacheslav Volodin is a strong supporter of the interests of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the trolls at the Internet Research Agency.

[32] In February 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the private military company Wagner Group, stated that he founded the IRA: "I’ve never just been the financier of the Internet Research Agency.

[33] Russian newspaper Vedomosti links the approved-by-Russian-authorities strategy of public consciousness manipulation through new media to Vyacheslav Volodin, first deputy of the Vladimir Putin Presidential Administration of Russia.

[38] Russian media point out that according to documents, published by hackers from Anonymous International, Concord Management is directly involved with trolling administration through the agency.

[39] Despite links to Alexei Soskovets, Nadejda Orlova, deputy head of the Committee for Youth Policy in Saint Petersburg, disputed a connection between her institution and the trolling offices.

[27] Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro, who reported extensively on the pro-Russian trolling activities in Finland, was targeted by an organized campaign of hate, disinformation and harassment.

According to Russian online newspaper DP.ru, several months before October 2014 the office moved from Olgino to a four-story building at 55 Savushkina Street, Primorskiy district, St. Peterburg.

[52] Novaya Gazeta reported that, according to Alexey Soskovets, head of the office in Olgino, North-Western Service Agency was hiring employees for similar projects in Moscow and other cities in 2013.

[61][62][63] According to the testimonies of the investigative journalists and former employees of the offices, the main topics for posts included:[27][31][38][49] The IRA has also leveraged trolls to erode trust in American political and media institutions and showcase certain politicians as incompetent.

[37][49] A 2015 BBC News investigation identified the Olgino factory as the most likely producer of a September 2015 "Saiga 410K review"[65] video where an actor posing as a U.S. soldier shoots at a book that turns out to be a Quran, which sparked outrage.

BBC News found among other irregularities that the soldier's uniform is not used by the U.S. military and is easily purchased in Russia, and that the actor filmed was most likely a bartender from Saint Petersburg related to a troll factory employee.

[66][67] The citizen-journalism site Bellingcat identified the team from Olgino as the real authors of a video attributed to the Azov Battalion in which masked soldiers threaten the Netherlands for organizing the referendum on the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement.

[69] In the beginning of 2016, Ukraine's state-owned news agency Ukrinform claimed to expose a system of bots in social networks, which called for violence against the Ukrainian government and for starting "The Third Maidan".

[70] In March 2014, the Polish edition of Newsweek expressed suspicion that Russia was employing people to "bombard" its website with pro-Russian comments on Ukraine-related articles.

[71] Poland's governmental computer emergency response team later confirmed that pro-Russia commentary had flooded Polish Internet portals at the start of the Ukrainian crisis.

[74][75][76][77][78] In late May 2014, the hacker group Anonymous International began publishing documents received from hacked emails of Internet Research Agency managers.

[81][82] The United States Justice Department announced the indictment on 16 February 2018, of the Internet Research Agency while also naming more than a dozen individual suspects who allegedly worked there as part of the special counsel's investigation into criminal interference with the 2016 election.

[4] According to a 2019 report by Oxford researchers including sociologist Philip N. Howard, social media played a major role in political polarization in the United States, due to computational propaganda – "the use of automation, algorithms, and big-data analytics to manipulate public life"—such as the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories.

"[84] The political scientist Thomas Rid has said that the IRA was the least effective of all Russia's interference campaigns in the 2016 U.S. election, despite its outsized press coverage, and that it made no measurable impact on American voters.

[86] A study published in Nature in 2023 found "no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior".

[4] Three months later, the same accounts posted false messages on Twitter about an Ebola outbreak in Atlanta under the keyword #EbolaInAtlanta, quickly relayed and picked up by users living in the city.

[89] In November 2017, The Guardian cited a University of Edinburgh study which found that hundreds of IRA accounts were also trying to influence UK politics by tweeting about Brexit.

Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia.According to a 17 October 2017 BuzzFeed News report, IRA recruited four African-American activists into taking real action via protests and self-defense training in what would seem to be a further attempt to exploit racial grievances.

[118] The "SecuredBorders" Facebook group organized the "Citizens before refugees" protest rally on 27 August 2016, at the City Council Chambers in Twin Falls, Idaho.

[120] "BlackMattersUS", an IRA website, recruited activists to participate in protests on the days immediately following 20 September 2016, police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina.

[133][134] The indicted individuals are Dzheykhun Nasimi Ogly Aslanov, Anna Vladislavovna Bogacheva, Maria Anatolyevna Bovda, Robert Sergeyevich Bovda, Mikhail Leonidovich Burchik, Mikhail Ivanovich Bystrov, Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina, Aleksandra Yuryevna Krylova, Vadim Vladimirovich Podkopaev, Sergey Pavlovich Polozov, Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, Gleb Igorevitch Vasilchenko, and Vladimir Venkov.