Anand Giridharadas - The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

In June 2014, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva arrived in the United States on a clandestine mission. Krylova was a high-ranking official at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, an ostensibly private company that was known to work on behalf of Russian intelligence. Bogacheva, her road buddy, a researcher and data cruncher, was more junior. Their trip had been well planned: a transcontinental itinerary, SIM cards, burner phones, cameras, visas obtained under the pretense of personal travel, and, just in case, evacuation plans.

The women made stops in California, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Texas, according to a federal indictment issued years later. Beyond that, their activities are not well known, though their mission is: to gather evidence of conditions in the United States for a project to destabilize its political system and society, using the rather improbable weapon of millions of social media posts.

In their long-simmering conflict with the United States, high officials in Russia, like their American counterparts, have a range of tools of sabotage available to them. Many are regularly put to use. But in recent years, the project Krylova and Bogacheva worked on was a marquee effort and a standout success, and that was telling. The investment in the project seemed to reflect a calculation by a highly capable foreign intelligence service that, of all the vulnerabilities of modern American society, the particular civic attitude that the project sought to inflame, writing other people offassuming they would never change their minds or ways, dismissing them as hopelessly mired in identities they couldnt escape, viewing those who thought differently as needing to be resisted rather than won over, refusing to engage in the work of persuasionwas an Achilles heel. That attitude had a hundred causes and a thousand expressions and could be found everywhere you looked, taking different guises on the left and the right, showing up among regular citizens and in the marble corridors of power.

Americans didnt exactly need outside help to see each other in these ways. If anything, the culture of the write-off had become a rare point of commonality across otherwise irreconcilable factions. Nevertheless, half a world away, in 2013, in St. Petersburg, the Internet Research Agency, or IRA, was founded, and it would soon begin down the road of amplifying Americans growing culture of mutual dismissal. It was set up as an industrial troll farm, where workers were paid to write blog posts, comments on news sites, and social media messages. Late in the summer of 2013, a job posting appeared online. Internet operators wanted! it read, according to the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Task: posting comments at profile sites in the Internet, writing thematic posts, blogs, social networks. Plus: PAYMENTS EVERY WEEK AND FREE MEALS!!!

The initial focus of the agency was swaying Western public opinion about Russias military intervention in Ukraine in 2014. But that same year, the agency launched a new department called the Translator Project. Its bailiwick was to foment political unrest in Russias great adversary, the United States. Krylova and Bogacheva embarked on their travels that year to aid the project, conducting their off-line field work for use online.

Though the womens expedition had some of the glamour of traditional espionage, with the throwaway phones and escape scenarios, the bulk of the IRAs work was more mundane. Hundreds of workers toiled in twelve-hour shifts at the IRA offices on 55 Savushkina Street. They received detailed instructions about the messages they were expected to promote. Each worker had to manage multiple fake accounts and produce message after message on each onereportedly three posts a day if Facebook was their medium, and fifty posts a day on Twitter. Managers obsessed over metrics like number of posts, page views, likes, retweets. The office was organized into groups including the Bloggers and Commentators Office, Rapid Response Department, CEO Department, Creative Department, and Social Network Specialists Department.

Like any workplace, the agency had its discontents. A worker might be fined for arriving late or even for leaving the office one minute early. There were also complaints about the cutbacks. At first, according to workers interviewed by local media outlets, there had been a relaxation room with sofas. One day, the sofas were gone. There had been paper towels in the bathroom. One day, there was a sign to use fewer of them. Then they were gone, replaced by an electric dryer that left much to be desired. Someone told a reporter of a clogged toilet bowl covered with tape for two weeks. Agency employees who spoke to the press generally said they were working there for the money, not out of ardor for Vladimir Putin.

One worker painted this picture of one of the bosses: Oleg was a funny man. Just imagine, a guy with a belly walks around in a denim shirt hanging out, fiddling with the keys to his car like a taxi driver, and saying, If a person knows how to write, he will write about anything. He wanted the troll farm to be a place where true artists of discourse toxification could unleash their talent.

Not everyone who passed through the agencys doors found it so amusing. Lyudmila Savchuk, a Russian journalist who said she took a job at the IRA to expose it, later recalled, One can remain sane in the factory for two months maximum. One of the stresses was the constant toggling among online avatars and their views and voices. But there was also a larger dread: The realization that you can invent any fact, then watch it absolutely synchronized with the media outlets as one massive information outflow and spread worldwidethat absolutely breaks your psyche.