Around 1000 professional russian Internet trolls are working against Ukraine
About 1000 professional russian Internet trolls are currently working against Ukraine, financed by the GRU, the FSB, or private companies of persons close to the russian authorities.
Oleksandr Kurban, head of the AP&PM Center for Countering Information Aggression, stated this during an online training session at Ukrinform, Detector Media reports.
According to the expert, this is twice as much as it was in the period between 2014 and the end of 2021, when about 500 trolls were working in Ukraine.
In general, according to Oleksandr Kurban, up to 5,000 professional trolls promote russian narratives all over the world. Each of them can simultaneously moderate from 30 to 50 accounts on different social networks. This amounts to 150–250 thousand working accounts, and their information coverage becomes 75–125 million contacts.
"Information weapons should be compared to weapons of mass destruction, a nuclear explosion. These are very serious things," the expert believes.
In Ukraine, 1,000 russian Internet trolls may have up to 50,000 accounts, covering up to 25 million contacts.
As IMI reported, in 2021, the Cardiff University Crime and Security Research Institute (UK) discovered that pro-kremlin trolls were commenting articles on websites of 32 well-known Western media outlets. This was done to influence public opinion in the interests of russia. The trolls were targeting media in 16 countries around the world, including the websites of the British Mail Online, Express and Times, the American Fox News, the French Le Figaro, the German Der Spiegel and Die Welt, and the Italian La Stampa.
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