Saint Petersburg--Lyudmila Savchuk says it was money that wooed her into the ranks of the Kremlin's online army, where she bombarded website comment pages with eulogies of President Vladimir Putin, while mocking his adversaries.
"Putin is great," "Ukrainians are Fascists," "Europe is decadent": Savchuk, 34, listed the main messages she was told to put out on Internet forums after responding to a job advertisement online.
"Our job was to write in a pro-government way, to interpret all events in a way that glorifies the government's politics and Putin personally," she said.
Performing her duties as an Internet "troll", Savchuk kept up several blogs on the popular Russian platform LiveJournal, juggling the virtual identities of a housewife, a student and an athlete.
While the blogs themselves would be filled with apolitical content about life in Russia, she was paid to use the account identities to comment on other news sites and online discussions, leaving 100 comments on an average day.
Every morning, she says, she would get assignments for the day, a list of subjects on which to comment and ideas to propagate.
"Ukraine has approved a reform plan to secure IMF aid" was the title of one recent assignment that Lyudmila had kept on her cellphone.
The instructions were for her to respond to the potentially positive Ukrainian news story with negative comments, such as "For the Ukrainian government, military needs are more important than those of the people."
Savchuk spent two months as a cyber-warrior, or what fans of news comment sections call "trolls", because they join to provoke or to spread propaganda, ruining what would usually be exchanges of opinion in good faith.
She said she worked in a nondescript grey building on Savushkin Street in a busy neighbourhood in the north of the city of Saint Petersburg before quitting in March.
AFP
