A Russian internet troll had to write 135 comments making fun of Obama for spitting out gum
Employees at Russia's Internet Research center work for 12 hours a day in 3-person "teams" spreading Kremlin propaganda online, acccording to St. Petersburg blogger and former "troll factory" worker Marat Burkhard.
Burkhard's strangest experience working for the factory, he says, came when Obama chewed gum in India and then spit it out.
"'You need to write 135 comments about this, and don't be shy about how you express yourself,'" Burkhard recalls being told. "'Write whatever you want,' they said, 'Just stick the word Obama in there a lot and then cover it over with profanities.'"
Obama has tried to break his smoking habit by chewing Nicorette nicotine replacement gum.
Burkhard told Radio Free that when it came to writing about Obama, employees' main task was to make him seem like "a black monkey who doesn't know anything about culture."
"You stick him in ancient India and he chews gum there," Burkhard said. "It's funny in the sense that they're ready to grab onto any little thing. On the other hand, it's not funny. It's absurd and it crosses a line."
Another typical assignment might be formatted as follows:
Topic: NATO troops are embedded with Ukrainian armed forces
Keywords: ukraine news, russia and ukraine, ukraine policy, ukraine, NATO, PMC (private military company)
Task: Raise this topic on 35 municipal forums
Russian internet trolls like Burkhard - who says he quit after two months of working at the Research Center - typically earn more than $700 per month clogging Russian municipal websites and forums with pro-Kremlin comments.
To make their comments seem independent and legitimate, employees are given separate "roles" they must play while maintaining their online personae: the 'villain' who disagrees with the forum and criticizes the authorities, the person who provides some kind of graphic that delegitimizes the villain's point, and the final commenter who has to post a link to some content that supports the graphic.
Their roles are designed as such so that private citizens reading the website see the anti-government "villain" ganged up on and shot down immediately with the "facts." The "team" sits together, and few spoken words are exchanged as they work furiously to meet their daily quota of 135 comments.
"We don't talk, because we can see for ourselves what the others are writing," Burkhard said. "But in fact you don't even have to really read it, because it's all nonsense."