Life in the Kremlin's troll farm

This is a fascinating piece of journalism, looking at the hyper-organised manipulators of social media:

I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes.

These are the propaganda farms of the social media age. Read right until the end – because the “Internet Research Agency” goes to work to start discrediting the author before he even publishes…