Journalist Nedim Turfent was reporting on a brutal counterterrorism operation in

Turkey‟s Kurdish region when he published video of soldiers standing over villagers,
who were face down with their hands bound. Soon, odd messages seeking Turfent‟s
whereabouts began appearing on his Facebook page.

Then, Twitter accounts linked to Turkish counterterrorism units joined in, taunting
locals with a single question—“Where is Nedim Turfent?”—as soldiers torched and
raided more villages.

The threat was clear: Give him up, or you‟re the next target.

That was in the spring of 2016. Within days, Turfent was in the military‟s hands, and he
was eventually charged with membership in a terrorist organization. An anonymous
Twitter account capped off the social media manhunt by tweeting a picture of Turfent in
custody, handcuffed and haggard. Then soldiers doused the office of his employer,
Dicle News Agency, with gasoline and set it ablaze. Turfent remains behind bars.

Violent Threats in...

Malta
Tina Urso went to bed on April 21 pleased with the small protest she helped organize in
London around the visit of Malta‟s prime minister. She wanted to call attention to the
country‟s unusual practice of selling passports to foreigners and the money laundering it
has engendered. By the time she woke up, her Facebook feed was deluged with threats
of violence and misogynist insults, including the false charge that she ran an escort
service. Researchers concluded the attacks were coordinated through private Facebook
groups administered by government employees and officials of Malta‟s ruling Labour
Party. Participants would eventually publish her parents‟ address, as well as her
confidential National ID card number. “My Facebook account was flooded with
notifications, people sharing everything about me, manipulating photos taken from my
profile,” Urso said. “It was just insane what they were able to do in just a few hours.”

Only a few years after Twitter and Facebook were celebrated as the spark for
democratic movements worldwide, states and their proxies are hatching new forms of
digitally enabled suppression that were unthinkable before the age of the social media
giants, according to evidence collected from computer sleuths, researchers and
documents across more than a dozen countries.

Combining virtual hate mobs, surveillance, misinformation, anonymous threats, and the
invasion of victims‟ privacy, states and political parties around the globe have created
an increasingly aggressive online playbook that is difficult for the platforms to detect or
counter.

Some regimes use techniques like those Russia deployed to influence the 2016 U.S.
presidential election, while others are riffing in homegrown ways. And an informal but
burgeoning industry of bot brokers and trolls-for-hire has sprung up to assist. The
efforts have succeeded in many cases, sending journalists into exile or effectively
silencing online expression.
In Venezuela, prospective trolls sign up for Twitter and Instagram accounts at
government-sanctioned kiosks in town squares and are rewarded for their participation
with access to scarce food coupons, according to Venezuelan researcher Marianne Diaz
of the group @DerechosDigitales. A self-described former troll in India says he was
given a half-dozen Facebook accounts and eight cell phones after he joined a 300-
person team that worked to intimidate opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
And in Ecuador, contracting documents detail government payments to a public
relations company that set up and ran a troll farm used to harass political opponents.

Many of those findings are contained in a report released this week by a global group of
researchers that uncovered evidence of state-sponsored trolling in seven countries, and
Bloomberg reporters documented additional examples in several others. The report is by
the Institute for the Future, a non-partisan, foresight research and public policy group
based in Palo Alto, California.

“These campaigns can take on the scale and speed of the modern internet,” the report
said. “States are using the same tools they once perceived as a threat to deploy
information technology as a means for power consolidation and social control, fueling
disinformation operations and disseminating government propaganda at a greater scale
than ever before.”

Almost two years in the making, the report grew out of an earlier project commissioned
by Google but never published. Researchers for the company‟s Jigsaw division, its
technology incubator, documented vicious harassment campaigns that were intended to
appear spontaneous but in fact had links to various governments. These campaigns often
operate “under a high degree of centralized coordination and deploy bots and centrally-
managed social media accounts designed to overwhelm victims and drown out their
dissent,” according to an unpublished copy of the Google report obtained through an
outside researcher.

In response to revolutions and social movements launched on Twitter and Facebook,

national governments initially censored content, blocked access to social media and
used surveillance technology to monitor their citizens. But it turned out to be far more
effective to simply inundate the platforms with a torrent of disinformation and
anonymized threats—what the researchers dubbed a strategy of “information
abundance” made possible by the rapid spread of social media.

Turkey is a prime example, according to Camille Francois, who directed the Jigsaw
project as a principal researcher at Google. Since the 2013 protests at Istanbul‟s Gezi
Park, President Recep Erdogan‟s government has used a combination of online and
offline repression to turn social media “into a near dead zone for genuine social protest
in Turkey,” Francois said. “Five years later, there is very little organically organized
activity.”

Social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter are struggling to counter the
significant resources and ingenuity that national governments and others are investing to
manipulate their platforms. Millions of fake accounts game the companies‟ algorithms,
manipulating what users see, while technologies such as location spoofing can make
centrally controlled accounts appear to be posts by armies of real people.
Twitter reportedly suspended 70 million fake and malicious accounts in May and June.
The company says it has taken preventive measures to address trolling and that any
form of malicious automation is a violation of Twitter rules. Facebook announced this
week that it will begin removing misinformation that serves to incite violence, and a
spokesman said it has invested in more effective ways to fight fake accounts. “We
enforce these policies whether the responsible party is acting individually, as part of a
company, or acting on behalf of a government,” a Facebook spokesman said.

Experts say the companies need to do even more to confront the fact that they‟re being
used by some of the world‟s most repressive regimes.

“People sometimes worry that Azerbaijan will shut down Facebook,” said Katy Pearce,
a communications professor at the University of Washington who has studied the
platform's use in that country. “Why would it? Facebook is the most effective tool of
control the government has.”

Rise of the Trolls

Social media is used to strike fear into opponents in both dictatorships and democracies.
See how it varies from country to country.

II
Trolling for Faith and Modi
Sitting cross-legged on a charpoy, an Indian day bed, Mahaveer Prasad Khileri taps on
his laptop, his face lit by the screen and a single bulb hanging from the ceiling of his
dirt-walled house. He uses his computer and two smartphones to advocate on social
media for an organization dedicated to the well-being of cows, which are sacred to
Hindus. Khileri‟s work serves as a penance of sorts for a time when his deep faith and
social media skills found a more toxic expression. He‟s a former troll for India‟s ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party, or the BJP. “At that time, poison was in my mind,” he said.

Khileri was recruited by two acquaintances into the party‟s social media operation in
February 2014, just as Modi was racing to become India's next prime minister. He was
given eight cell phones and ID‟s for six different Facebook identities, he recalled in an
interview in his home village of Jogaliya. He worked 18-hour days, toggling between
legitimate campaign work and trolling of opponents and journalists, he said. When
Modi won, the operation evolved as well, transitioning to a tool supporting Modi‟s
government.

Khileri worked in what the BJP calls its „IT Cell,‟ which effectively operated as an ad
hoc troll farm, he said. The development of the cell in the world's largest democracy
occurred around the same time that American authorities believe Russia began using
such techniques to influence the 2016 presidential election. The researchers contributing
to the institute and Google reports found similar timing in different countries and under
various circumstances.
Mahaveer Prasad Khileri, a former troll for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, at his
home in Jogaliya, India in May 2018. Source: Bibhudatta Pradhan of Bloomberg News

According to Khileri, the Indian version of the trolling toolkit included strategies meant
to inflame sectarian differences, malign the Muslim minority and portray Modi as savior
of the Hindus. Supervisors would set themes for the day and specify targets to attack.
Khileri and 300 other paid trolls would create memes or cut-and-paste Twitter posts that
were sent to WhatsApp groups of tens of thousands of party loyalists. Their reposts sent
hashtags viral in minutes.

“Muslims slaughter cows, so we‟d tell them, „When Modi comes, we will slaughter
you,‟” Khileri recalled. “We‟d tell Hindus: „If you don‟t vote for Modi, then Muslims
will destroy you.‟”

The former head of BJP‟s IT CELL, Arvind Gupta, tweeted in December 2016 that
neither the party nor the cell has ever encouraged trolling and that online support for the
party comes from a voluntary, grass-roots movement. The current head of the cell, Amit
Malviya, said he would comment only after seeing evidence that Khileri was a member
of it. Khileri said he eventually quit the cell—which paid its members in cash and left
no paper trail—after he grew increasingly uncomfortable with the power it amassed.

“At any time, they can control the situation of India. The troll army can call a
nationwide strike, shut down the country,'' he said. “They are able to push for fights
between communities, to create communal tension or destroy communal harmony.”

III
From Jingles to Death Threats
Trolling efforts take different forms in different countries. Party youth groups were
commandeered in some. Others developed highly structured volunteer armies. Some
simply paid contractors to do the work. Always, though, organizers took pains to make
the activity appear spontaneous.

Trolling for food in ...

Venezuela
The government assists people in opening social media accounts through “Candanga
Points”—kiosks set up in town squares—part of an effort announced in 2017 to create
digital militiamen, according to the Institute for the Future's report. The Ministry of
Communications distributes memes, hashtags and trolling targets via dedicated channels
on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, according to Marianne Diaz, a Venezuelan
researcher. Among the targets have been Lorenzo Mendoza, a government critic and
president of Empresas Polar, a food distribution company, that trolls sought to blame for
chronic food shortages. Diaz said the kiosks are managed by the same local committees
that determine who gets access to food coupons, effectively motivating people to troll
for food in a devastated economy with rampant malnutrition.

In Ecuador, former President Rafael Correa engaged a Guayaquil-based public relations

firm called Inteligencia Emocional to promote his 2012 reelection, complete with
videos, jingles, Facebook fan pages and a unified social media front under the brand Yo
Revolución.

But additional work by the firm was more secretive. It set up and maintained a network
of pro-Correa social media accounts that harassed political opponents, according to
documents released by Ecuador Transparente, a whistleblower website that opposed the
Correa administration. In a proposal to the Ecuadorean government, the firm proposed
to charge $15,000 per month to staff its network around the clock with “community
managers” in a “war room,” enabling it to “totally neutralize” offending content on the
internet.

Internal Inteligencia Emocional documents anonymously leaked to Ecuador

Transparente described the operation as a “troll center” and said that, due to the
sensitivity of the project, it would implement a series of security protocols. Those steps
included encrypting data shared among computers, scrubbing metadata from all
materials and obscuring the location of the computers.

Correa did not respond to requests for comment; nor did the head of Inteligencia
Emocional, Kenneth Godwin.

Another set of leaked documents seen by Bloomberg showed that Ecuador‟s trolling
operation involved the country's intelligence directorate. The operation eventually
became notorious for death threats and trafficking in hacked personal material of
journalists and political opponents. Even ordinary citizens who used social media to
speak out against the government were targeted, according to Martha Roldós, an
investigative journalist and the daughter of a former president of Ecuador who has been
a target of the troll operations.
A leaked document shows Venezuela's plans for developing a government-backed “troll
army,” including a military-style organizational structure. The country‟s Interior
Ministry did not return requests for comment about the plan.

IV
Organized Like Drug Cartels
In Mexico, the interference of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts in public discourse
has been so pernicious during the tenure of outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto that
his political opponents have dubbed them “Penabots.” Bot networks have also been
used against the government‟s agenda.

Two years ago, investigative journalist and activist Alberto Escorcia began
documenting one of Mexico's unique contributions to trolling: loosely organized youth
gangs that former members told Escorcia are paid to stage virtual hate-mob attacks on
journalists or activists who confront the government.
A picture of Kurdish journalist Nedim Turfent posted by a Twitter user after his arrest
in May 2016, with a message saying, the “bastard was arrested!”. Source: Twitter
With monikers such as the Holk Legion, the gangs are organized like the region‟s
infamous drug cartels, Escorcia said. In one case documented by Amnesty International,
Holk Legion trolls used more than 2,000 accounts to send death threats to 10 journalists
and public figures over two days. The blizzard of tweets came on the second
anniversary of a mass kidnapping of students in Guerrero State, an event that has
plagued Peña Nieto's government amid evidence of police and military involvement.
The trolls‟ menacing tweets arrived as a counterweight to renewed public outrage
sparked by the anniversary.

Eduardo Sanchez, a spokesman for the Pena Nieto administration, said that “there‟s no
such thing” when asked by Bloomberg about the allegations that some networks of
trolls have promoted the government‟s agenda.

The Google report that examined government-connected trolling was initially set to be
published last year, according to researchers who collaborated with the company. Some
of them said congressional and law enforcement investigations into Russia's election
meddling may have made the topic too sensitive.

A spokesman for the company‟s Jigsaw division, Dan Keyserling, said not all research
projects end up being published and that information from the report was used internally
to improve tools that detect abusive content. Jigsaw supports the fact that other
organizations are continuing research into state-sponsored trolling, he said.

V
How to Build a Botnet
Turkey's experience shows how politicians turned social media platforms into tools of
information control—and rapidly perfected their techniques. Erdogan's government was
badly shaken by protests that began in May 2013 and grew over weeks to focus on
government corruption. Within months, the ruling party was fielding its own bot army,
albeit a poorly disguised one. Researchers found a collection of nearly 18,000 pro-
Erdogan Twitter accounts that used profile pictures taken from porn sites or public
figures as American actress Megan Fox.

By 2017, the country's digital troops had evolved into something more finer-tuned and
threatening. A report by AccessNow, a digital rights organization, identified a collection
of fake accounts posing as people sympathetic to a protest march scheduled for that
summer. The event would focus attention on the crackdown on journalists, teachers and
others following an attempted coup in 2016.

Targeted in...

Ecuador
Martha Roldos, the daughter of the nation‟s first democratically elected president, is no
stranger to political mysteries: Almost four decades after her father died in a 1981 plane
crash, Ecuadoreans still speculate about who was responsible. On Jan. 6, 2014, Roldos
herself was targeted by what was then a new and mysterious form of attack. Her private
emails were stolen by hackers, then published on the front page of a pro-government
newspaper. Those communications were spread by government-controlled social media
accounts, which also smeared and threatened her. Roldos, who runs an investigative
journalism project in Ecuador called Mil Hojas, eventually helped piece together
evidence showing that the government of President Rafael Correa had built and funded
the secret troll operation that attacked her and also targeted hundreds of others.

One such account, with a picture of a young woman claiming to be a march supporter,
posted a link to a website for participants. Visitors to the site had their devices infected
with advanced malware that spied on their communications and tracked their
movements, the AccessNow report found. The company that created the malware sells
only to governments.

Researchers and journalists have documented similar bot armies in Argentina, Thailand,
Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Saudi trolling was on display after the May 15 arrest of seven prominent Saudi
women‟s rights activists who had been demanding an end to the ban on female drivers.
The Saudi government initially gave no information about the activists‟ whereabouts.
Concerned Twitter users posted messages followed by an Arabic hashtag “Where are
the activists?” That was quickly countered with a hashtag circulated by a state-backed
news organization labeling the activists “Agents of the Embassies,” alongside pictures
of them with the Arabic word for “Traitor” stamped over their faces

It got uglier. “How‟s prison food?” one account asked Loujain Al-Hathloul, a Western-
educated 28-year-old who‟d previously been detained after live-Tweeting herself
driving. “You act like you‟re something when you‟re nothing,” read another, next to a
knife emoji. Another account linked to an archive of Al-Hathloul‟s tweets, so opponents
could scour the words of an “enemy of the homeland.”

An analysis by Graphika, a social media intelligence firm based in New York, showed
that the “Agents” hashtag was “pushed” in a highly coordinated way, said John Kelly,
the company's CEO and founder. Marc Owen Jones, a researcher and lecturer on Gulf
affairs at Exeter University, found evidence that the hashtag was pushed by automated
accounts tied to a vast pro-Saudi government botnet that he'd previously identified.

“It still remains to be seen whether this is a state-sponsored operation, the work of a PR
company, or a wealthy individual‟s unilateral project,” Owen Jones wrote about that
botnet in February.

VI
Misogyny and Rape Threats
Some of the most virulent attacks are aimed at women. The Institute for the Future
report found that every identified instance of state-sponsored trolling involving female
victims used heavily misogynistic language, including threats of rape and mutilation.

The graphic, relentless posts often prove to be powerful weapons, publicly singling out
a regime's opponents and legitimizing those who attack them, while leading some
journalists to self-censor their reporting, according to the report.
This meme, replacing the image of Jesus Christ next to Pontius Pilate with that of
Daphne Caruana Galizia, was posted a few weeks before the journalist's assassination
on Oct. 16, 2017. Source: Private Facebook group

Before she was killed by a car bomb last October 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia, who
gained fame writing about corruption on the tiny Mediterranean island nation of Malta,
grew so anxious about the online attacks that greeted her blog posts that she often
hesitated before publishing a new one, said her son, Paul Caruana Galizia.

Many of the violent comments against his mother were coordinated inside a handful of
private Facebook groups run by government employees and which count among their
members ruling Labour Party lawmakers. The secret groups, whose operations were
revealed in the months following her death, circulated “thousands of really horrifically
abusive comments” against his mother, he said.

One meme, which circulated shortly before her death, substituted her image for that of
Jesus Christ next to Pontius Pilate, who asks the crowd: “What do you want me to do
with her?” Comments encouraging violence poured in. “The dehumanization by the
time she was killed around that period was complete,” her son said.

According to examples uncovered by researchers, trolls also threatened to sexually

abuse Turkish journalist Ceydan Karan with a broken bottle, while Mexican scholar
Rossana Reguillo was sent pictures of burned bodies with the warning, “This could
happen to you.”

The fact that the threats are designed to look like they are coming from crowds of
anonymous social media users makes them more ominous in some cases than if they
had been issued directly by the government.
“That‟s the genius of these types of attacks,” said Carly Nyst, one of the authors of the
Institute for the Future report and an expert on the intersection of human rights and
technology. “It‟s hard to distinguish between what‟s being manufactured on purpose
and what is a popular uprising of opinion against the target.”

One question left unanswered by the reports is why so many nations developed
strikingly similar trolling operations at around the same time. There is some evidence of
information-sharing among countries, consultants and government functionaries.

Correa, the former president of Ecuador, now hosts a television show for the Spanish-
language version of RT, the Russian news channel that is closely tied to sophisticated
government-sponsored information campaigns. And last year, when Philippines
President Rodrigo Duterte was in the Kremlin meeting with Russian President Vladimir
Putin, a representative of the Philippines state-run media visited the Moscow
headquarters of RT and entered into a partnership with the news agency and Russia‟s
communication ministry.

Duterte has used Facebook as a platform to aggressively target critics, and he has
appointed well-known trolls to government posts.

In Azerbaijan, the government maintains a close relationship with Russia, which has
exported some of its technological know-how, including bots, according to Pearce, the
University of Washington professor.

Still, tracing the fingerprints of state-sponsored trolling remains a difficult task, largely
because states go to great lengths to cover tracks. Francois, the former Google
researcher, says the architecture of a trolling campaign is often akin to a hand inside a
glove that organizes an action and then is removed.

While the glove is left behind for the world to see, the hand simply disappears.

(Updates 15th paragraph with Facebook announcement on removing misinformation.)

With assistance from Sarah Frier, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, Stephan Kueffner and
Andrew Rosati.
Edited by Flynn McRoberts and John Voskuhl
Design and code Steph Davidson with help from James Singleton

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