= new reply since forum marked as read
Oh man, I remember skimming through this article ages ago, and I TOTALLY remember this photo of the troll factory...
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In September 2013, journalists discovered that Prigozhin owned the infamous “troll factory” in the Olgino region of St. Petersburg. Officially, the founder and CEO of the “Internet Research Agency” was the retired police colonel Mikhail Bystrov, but the agency was created with the help of several people close to Prigozhin. For example, Maria Kuprashevich, who worked in the PR department at Concord, played an important role at the “troll factory” in Olgino.
The Internet Research Agency worked like this: people were hired and paid specially to write posts and comments on social media (praising the Russian authorities, and criticizing the anti-Kremlin opposition). One typical phrase conceived and disseminated by the troll factory in Olgino read, “Alexey Navalny, who calls himself a ‘truth seeker’ and a ‘freedom fighter,’ has earned himself a reputation as a liar, a fraud, and a traitor to Russia. Meeting with representatives of foreign intelligence services, Navalny once again proves that he's on the West's payroll.”
About 400 people worked around the clock in Olgino, sitting at computers and writing on Russian social networks according to pre-prepared scripts. After the February 2015 murder of Boris Nemtsov, for instance, the trolls were given the following assignment: “The main idea is that we're cultivating the view that Ukrainian players might have been involved in the death of this Russian oppositionist. [...] That now Russia has once again become a country that faces the West's hostility. This is an obvious provocation, and an effort to create a surge of discontent among the opposition's leaders, who will begin calling for protests and demonstrations with the aim of overthrowing the government.”
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Again, thanks for posting!