This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

Back in St. Petersburg, Putin’s propaganda machine, known as the Internet Research Agency, was just sputtering up. The Russians code-named their creation the Translator Project, and its stated goal was to “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.” Putin nominated his former chef—a burly bald man named Yevgeny Prigozhin, who spent nine years in prison for fraud before working his way from a hot-dog salesman to Putin’s confidante—to oversee Russia’s information warfare campaign from an unassuming four-story building just off Red Square. With a multimillion-dollar budget at its disposal—source still unknown—the Internet Research Agency (IRA) set to work recruiting twentysomething news writers, graphics designers, and “search engine-optimization specialists” with $1,400 weekly salaries, more than four times what they could make anywhere else. On one floor, Russian trolls operating in rotating twelve-hour shifts created and deployed hundreds of fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter to pummel anyone who criticized their master, Vladimir Putin. On another floor, the IRA trolls waited for their daily assignment: a list of America’s political crises du jour, anything the Russians could exploit for division, distrust, and mayhem.