Democracy imperiledThe time of the trolls

Published 13 December 2018

The West woke up to the threat of Kremlin trolls in 2016, however it had already been very damaging in 2014–2015. The Ukraine crisis saw the deployment of trolls to Facebook and VKontakte, as well as YouTube and Twitter. The investigation into Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election showed that trolling was never completely dependent on a technology like bots, nor that it was predominantly about Kremlin employees sitting somewhere in Russia manufacturing anti-Clinton propaganda. Rather, it was ordinary Americans and Europeans that were sharing the messages launched by trolls, and often posting them themselves.

The nascent internet played a key role in defeating the military coup in Russia in 1991, notes Andrei Soldatov, co-author with Irina Borogan of The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators (2015). The democratic promise of the web, however, was never fulfilled. In the 2000s, it became a means of escape for a disaffected Russian middle class closed out of the political process. The failed anti-Putin protest wave of 2011–2012 bore the mark of this “lost decade.” The West woke up to the threat of Kremlin trolls in 2016, but the threat had already been on full display in 2014–2015, during the Ukraine crisis.

Here is an extract from Soldatov’s essay in Eurozine:

The West woke up to the threat of Kremlin trolls in 2016, however it had already been very damaging in 2014–2015. The Ukraine crisis saw the deployment of trolls to Facebook and VKontakte, as well as YouTube and Twitter. The operation was directed at Ukrainians, but it was the Russian people that were hit the hardest. The Kremlin propaganda campaign was based on three points: the legacy of the Second World War and the image of the Soviet Union as savior of the world from fascism; grievances against the West; and fears of another bloody revolution. These produced stories such as that of the child crucified by Ukrainian fascists, who had come to the East of the country after the Maidan revolution, supported by an ungrateful and treacherous West.

By 2014–2015, then, the internet had come very far from being a space dominated by a relatively small group of IT-professionals with similar backgrounds, who observed the tacit and commonly accepted rules of engagement in public debate.