"The money was drank, reports showed"

The publication of RBC published an investigation on the possible involvement of the Russian "Trolls from Olgino" under the leadership of Evgeny Prigozhin, personal cook Vladimir Putin, to interfere with the US presidential campaign in 2016. According to RBC, Prigogine from the office on Savushkin Street in St. Petersburg is associated with at least 120 communities and thematic accounts that somehow tried to influence political life in the United States.

The "American direction" in the work of the "troll factory" was created back in 2015. About this RBC was told by one of the employees of the "Factory". Then, through Facebook, a promotion with an eye on the residents of New York was promoted, within the framework of which they promised to distribute free hot dogs, the newspaper writes .

In addition, the source said that since March 2015, people began to recruit people to work with American communities in real time in the new department. They also began to “issue tasks to discredit the image of candidates” who exhibited their candidates in the Presidential election in the United States.

In the summer of 2016, 80–90 workers worked in the “American department” of the troll factories, who created and posted more than a thousand units of content per week, with the number of views of 20-30 million in September weeks of 2016, RBC writes . According to the publication, the salary fund of the department reaches 60–70 million rubles, or about $ 1 million a year. Ordinary "trolls" receive about 60 thousand rubles (plus bonuses for the reaction of participants in communities), administrators - up to 90 thousand rubles, management - from 120 thousand rubles. This was told by the former and current employees.

Troll factory on Savushkin St. in St. Petersburg

The aggregate expenses of the "troll factories" for the work of the American department for two years could be approximately $ 2.3 million, counted in RBC. So, the salary fund for this period could amount to about $ 2 million. About 80 thousand dollars in two years were spent on various IT consumption, the interlocutor of the publication within the organization said .

Earlier, traces of the "trolls" in the comments on the articles on the topic of American politics were found by journalists of Western publications. In addition, the evidence of Russia's intervention in the 2016 presidential election in the United States was disclosed by Google. According to her , Russian agents spent tens of thousands of dollars on advertising for the spread of disinformation on many Google platforms, including YouTube, the Google Search search engine, the Gmail email service and the DoubleClick advertising network.

RBC in his investigation reports that the “trolls” spent about 120 thousand dollars to promote on social networks, mainly on the purchase of advertising on Facebook. About 80 thousand went to local American activists who helped to spend dozens of offline events, without even suspecting who deal with whom.

Evgeny Prigozhin, restaurateur and head of the "Troll factory"

The head of the Department of New Media and the Communication theory of Journalism of Moscow State University Ivan Zasursky does not begin to judge how effectively Russian trolls intervene in American politics - he believes that they could spend much less on the implementation of this project: they wrote in the reports:

"The Russian method of doing business suggests that not all money reaches the implementation of the goal that is set. Therefore, I am very careful about any reports that could be presented to the customer. Because we have a tradition in Russia-always exaggerate these figures. Usually everyone earns on the difference between what is actually done and what we have reported. This is our business model. This I will not be surprised at costs, if all these millions are absolutely not confirmed if all these people were corresponding to each other, I will not be surprised either. ”

According to Ivan Zasursky, the influence of Russian trolls on the outcome of the US presidential election is exaggerated:

“It doesn’t matter how much money you invest in this, but Donald Trump is an American, and the Americans voted for him. All the versions that are now being investigated are a little in the key to such a media bubble, media, and at the same time everything becomes doubtful: that the cars were somehow incorrectly considered, maybe there were some kind of especially important states, there were some kind of campaign, there were some kind of campaigns. And the fact that the Russians were here, it seems to me that there is a certain problem with how America perceives himself, and many in the USA are much easier to come to terms with the fact that they were beaten by insidious Russians, than to admit that most Americans wanted Trump for many people.

Political scientist Ekaterina Shulman does not doubt the existence of the Russian factory of trolls and its millionth budgets, but the results of their intervention in American politics also do not seem significant:

“Have they managed to influence-this is a slightly metaphysical question, because the matter of influence is not much clear. Looking from Russia, it is difficult to believe that at least with a budget of 100 thousand dollars, even with a budget of $ 2 million, by publishing fake or not fake news, fussing to the gigantic size of some genuine micronics or some other methods can really be influenced by the initiation of elections in the election. The country, as a goal, is usually recognized by all sorts of high -ranking “trolls” that communicate with the press is not to provide a specific result, and what is called, to undermine the trust of democratic institutions. This also applies to Russia, in which nothing can be organized from abroad, this applies, in my opinion, the United States. ”

Internet expert Anton Merkurov believes that the history of the influence of Russian trolls on the elections in the United States, and does not believe that Evgeny Prigozhin’s employees are capable of effective work with high results:

"They cannot undermine 20 St. Petersburg gopniks for two million dollars of the US electoral system. Trump led to power not mythical" St. Petersburg trolls. "On the other hand, thanks to Prigozhin’s efforts and this St. Petersburg gopota, they raised a scream that Russia, which is behind all indicators, in GDP and otherwise, has become the main threat to the United States. And Russian hackers are being discussed there now, as they have grown up to The election, and now in Austria, a young left -handed dude has come to power, and there are seriously discussing how Russia is undermining, on the one hand, to say that 90 trolls can buy 100 thousand advertisements and undermined the electoral process, it would be strange.

All the activities of the "trolls", the results of which were published by journalists, Anton Merkurov calls "fake", but dangerous:

“From a social and media point of view, this, of course, is harm and horror. And the fact that some kind of Putin’s cook is engaged in such things is especially disgusting. The money drank, the reports showed, Priguzhin spent 2 million on it, and he probably got a dozen, but in practice nothing happened. That is, everyone believed that Russia intervened, arranged protest and so on, and so on, and so on. There was nothing to practice, but this is such a hype that everyone believed.

US President Donald Trump wants an speedy completion of investigations of the Kremlin’s possible intervention in the American electoral process conducted by the Congress commissions and an independent prosecutor. The US president said this on Monday, October 16. According to Trump, the time has come to finish the investigation, because all this is "tired of the Americans." Special prosecutor Robert Muller did not find “absolutely no signs of conspiracy” between people from his election headquarters and Russian representatives, Donald Trump emphasized .

One of the tasks of Robert Muller is to identify potential contacts between people from Donald Trump's entourage when his presidential candidate and people close to the Kremlin was. American intelligence services came to the conclusion that the Kremlin conducted cyberoperations in order to interfere with the American election campaign. Donald Trump's opponents suspect that people from his headquarters could cooperate with the Kremlin.