Putin’s Trolls: A Hybrid Memoir

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By Jessikka Aro

Putin's Trolls is a chilling account of Russia's modern tools of information warfare, shedding light on the individuals and organizations behind the Kremlin's coordinated, military-style social media psy-ops. In this courageous and unflinching book,  journalist Jessikka Aro interweaves her own dramatic story as a target of Russian social media propaganda trolls with accounts from many internationally known critics of the Kremlin--all of whom share their own stories as targets of Russia's multifaceted cyber warfare campaigns. After Jessikka began to investigate the Kremlin trolls' impact outside Russia's borders, she quickly realized that, in addition to the Russian population at large, foreign private citizens were made targets of carefully designed information operations. These operations were conducted through organized "troll factories," in some cases led by Russia's security and intelligence apparatus. Often the operations were orchestrated with the help of basically unregulated social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. A real-life thriller, Putin's Trolls is a one-of-a-kind exploration into Russia's information warfare techniques, which threaten the very building blocks of Western societies.