SEOUL, South Korea — Jessikka Aro, a journalist who spent years researching the activities of pro-Russia internet trolls, wanted fact-checkers to know this: If you look for Russian influence in your region, you will find it — and it is vital that journalists work to expose these propaganda networks and inform the public.

On June 29, Aro — an award-winning Finnish journalist and author of the books “Putin’s Troll Army” and “Putin’s Trolls: On the Frontlines of Russia’s Information War Against the World,” — addressed hundreds of journalists and researchers at GlobalFact10, the world’s largest fact-checking summit hosted by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the non-profit Poynter Institute and SNUFactCheck of South Korea.

During a 45-minute conversation with Alanna Dvorak, IFCN international training manager, Aro discussed her research, the influence of pro-Russia operatives online and the heavy personal toll of her work. 

Russia’s online influence is vast, she warned. 

Journalist Jessikka Aro urged fact-checkers and journalists to do more work investigating Russian misinformation and propaganda operations online during a session at GlobalFact 10 in Seoul, South Korea. Journalists “have to expose these operations and bring them to daylight,” she said.

Online, pro-Russia groups “have been pushing Britain to exit the European Union,” Aro said. “They have been spreading so much and so (many) different COVID and COVID vaccine-related conspiracy theories. They have been fueling different kinds of conspiracy groups in different countries. They have been promoting the far-right politicians in many European countries.”

And there aren’t many journalists covering Russia’s online influence for audiences around the world, Aro said.

Journalists and fact-checkers “have to expose these operations and bring them to daylight, and also to acknowledge that this warfare exists and to explain it to people,” Aro said. “I have been so astonished that there are not so many journalists covering this topic.”

She said she was surprised by the lack of coverage, but also noted that that means there are still plenty of story opportunities. 

“It’s super easy, because it is out there,” she said. “It is very easy to track thanks to social media networks,” and because much of Russia’s online efforts are public. 

Exposing disinformation campaigns is one of the first ways to combat Russian disinformation, but engaging with people who’ve “already been brainwashed and dragged (down) the rabbit hole” is another important way to combat Russia’s online influence, Aro said. She said Russia’s propaganda machinery tells people that western media and journalists are corrupt and politically motivated liars. 

“They are building a bigger and bigger community who just hate us and feel that we are bad and toxic,” Aro told the crowd of fact-checkers. “We actually need to communicate with these people more and find ways of engaging with them again.”  

To do that, Aro encouraged journalists to keep investigating and producing stories — and to ensure those stories are “interesting enough to also reach those audiences who we might normally dismiss and who are turning to the Russian state media for information.” 

“We have to be better,” she said.

She encouraged every journalist to familiarize themselves with Russia’s psychological information warfare. Pro-Russia operatives rely on tactics that they’ve used since the Cold War, Aro said. 

“Those methods are, for example, ‘rotten herring,’ named after the idea that they want to really rub the smell of rotten fish everywhere on the target person’s clothes,” she said. “They also create these so-called ‘big lies’ that are so big that it’s very difficult for anyone to think of the possibility that anyone could come up with such a big lie.”

Russian trolls employ these strategies in their online campaigns as well. The term “Russian troll” is a spinoff of the generic internet term “troll,” which refers to people who pick arguments and harass others online. 

“It was actually the Russians who were working within the troll factory — well, the company called Internet Research Agency — who started calling themselves, in Russian, ‘trolls,’  because of the nature of their work,” Aro explained. 

As part of her investigation, Aro visited a Russian troll factory that employed hundreds of workers on its own. Additionally, in 2014 and 2015, when she first started researching, Russian embassies abroad were operating as so-called troll hubs, she said.

Anyone can put up a Russian troll network without much difficulty — and that’s part of the problem, Aro said. 

Even small nations that might not immediately think of themselves as a Russian target are susceptible to Russian influence and misinformation.

“These trolls operate internationally,” Aro said. They operate in media comment sections and on social media platforms that are used internationally and they don’t pose as Russians. 

“They pose as international, English-speaking, very interesting social media characters,” Aro said. “Sometimes, the regular media has been known to quote them.”

There are a variety of reasons the Kremlin conducts information warfare, she said. Russia might intend to build support for its war against Ukraine, for example. Other times, Aro said the Kremlin wages information warfare to show its might and terrorize others. 

When studying literature about Cold War history, Aro said she encountered yet another explanation: “Then-Soviet defectors revealed to western intelligence that they were called to brainstorm ideas of how to attack the west without using physical, kinetic warfare,” she said. 

These approaches can be seen in recent events, Aro said. 

Russian trolls have spread the false claim that Russia didn’t start the war in Ukraine, and instead was responding to Ukrainian aggression, Aro said. They’ve also spread the idea that Putin wants peace and negotiations while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a warmonger.

Some of the anti-Ukraine conspiracy theories that Russian officials spread openly to international media had previously been spread by anonymous and fake online pro-Russia trolls, for example.

“It has gotten more hardcore, more open, more visible to everyone, and more violent,” she said. “They really ramped their operations up after February last year, when they accelerated their genocidal warfare against Ukraine.” 

Tackling Russian misinformation comes with a cost 

Although Aro encouraged others to investigate Russian influence, a large part of her discussion with Dvorak focused on the consequences she faced as a result of her work. 

“Your investigation came at a great personal expense for you,” Dvorak said. “The first chapter of your book, you talk about how you had to leave Finland based on the harassment that you faced.”

Aro recalled online harassment, doxing and even physical intimidation. An online troll campaign was so successful at mobilizing real Finnish people to hate her that she said the Finnish police told her that she faced “the threat of impulsive violence,” if she were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

More than 300 stories targeting Aro were published online, containing personal attacks and spreading unsupported claims. 

The stories alleged Aro was mentally ill, using drugs, spreading drugs, and writing all her stories under the influence of drugs. The stories also spread “vivid fantasies about me, for example, working for U.S. intelligence officials, spreading U.S. propaganda narratives in Finnish media based on what CIA masters told me to do,” Aro said.

In some instances, she said those stories were clicked more than 2 million times. 

“It kind of sounds funny, but it really isn’t when there are actual real people who then come after me,” Aro said. “There’s this synergy between these fake news stories and then real people taking action.”

“There’s this synergy between these fake news stories and then real people taking action.”

People followed her in the streets, live streaming her, she said. Others found and used her dead father’s data against her. 

“They actually pretended to be my dead father, who at that time had been dead for 20 years,” Aro said. They “sent me a text message (saying,) ‘I’m alive and I’m monitoring you.’ ”

Some of her harassers were eventually convicted in Finland, but others have not faced justice. And Aro said the Russian troll factory she’d visited during her investigation also went after her.

“According to Russian state media, I am the worst stalker in Finland,” she said with a laugh. “So beware.” 

Jokes aside, Aro advised others facing organized harassment campaigns to seek out support from people who are in the same position. Find ways to avoid experiencing it alone, she said.  

She said she also kept in mind that the harassment was “exactly at the core of Russian information psychological manipulation.” 

“They really wanted to make me feel anxious, so that I would just turn away from this topic,” and feel relieved because the harassment stopped, Aro said. She said she felt that if she let them control her editorial decisions, then she was depriving her audience of the right to receive the information she’d uncovered.

Moved by her determination in the face of an onslaught of harassment, the audience of fact-checkers surprised Aro with a standing ovation near the end of her session.

How are fact-checkers around the world tackling Russian disinformation?

Fact-checking representatives (L-R) Uschi Jonas, of CORRECTIV.Faktencheck in Germany, Ika Ningtyas Unggraini, of TEMPO in Indonesia, and Marcin Żółtowski of FakeNews.pl in Poland, discussed how fact-checkers around the world are dealing with Russian disinformation at GlobalFact 10.

Journalist Uschi Jonas, the team lead of CORRECTIV.Faktencheck in Germany, said that her team decided to launch its first podcast and focus on disinformation surrounding the war in Ukraine. 

The podcast aimed to provide a deep dive into the main narratives and key figures of disinformation about the war in Ukraine, to reach a new audience and to give insight into CORRECTIV’s daily fact-checking work, she said.  

Although the podcast — which is not yet complete but should release its first episode in August — was a large and challenging undertaking, she encouraged other fact-checkers to explore the audio medium. You don’t fully have to reinvent the wheel, she said. 

“It was really stressful,” she said. “But it’s also a lot of fun” and can reach a new audience.

“We had so many fact-checking articles on the war in Ukraine,” and they planned to use them for the podcast, Jonas said. “In the end, it won’t be the same audience reading the fact-checking articles and listening to the podcast.”

Ika Ningtyas Unggraini, fact-check coordinator at TEMPO, an Indonesian organization with a fact-checking team, said that across social media platforms, her organization debunked more than 75 pieces of online content related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from February 2022 to March 2023.

A vast majority of that disinformation came from videos, she said. She also warned that it can generate money because content about the Russian invasion and Russian President Vladimir Putin generates “very big clicks in Indonesia.” Ningtyas Unggraini added that the Russian disinformation spread in Indonesia was specifically tailored toward what might appeal to Indonesian social media users.

Marcin Żółtowski, a social analyst at FakeNews.pl in Poland, shared a bit of good news: Even tailored Russian disinformation campaigns designed to target specific populations don’t always work. 

FakeNews.pl is a site dedicated to the study of fake news and misinformation, and Żółtowski told GlobalFact attendees that, in the weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, analysis of Polish social media revealed that Russian trolls pushed particular narratives to try to generate pro-Russia, anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland, specifically. 

“Russian disinformation was a social project, but it was ineffective,” Żółtowski said. In the period of time FakeNews.pl monitored, the Polish public supported Ukraine.

“We had around 10 million refugees from Ukraine,” he said. “That wasn’t the state or a government action. That was the regular people opening their houses for the Ukrainian refugees.”