“It was Easter. On the day of Commemoration of the dead, I went to the cemetery like everyone else. However, unlike others I was holding a lit candle in one hand and sharing posts on my cell phone with the other.”
The dissemination of false news is no longer a foreign topic. We all know very well that by spreading false news, certain groups try to public opinion. But if I ask the question, “Have you seen or heard of a person behind all this?”, the answer will probably be no. They are always in the shadows, as if they do not even exist.
Just a screen, a keyboard and a lot of imagination is enough to become a shining star in the mountains of fake news–easy to ascend to but difficult to leave. To the public, these people are known as “trolls”.
Just like the protagonist of my article, who requested anonymity.
“It all started with joining the government team,” he told me. “There was a vacancy in the social media manager position at a pro-government channel, I just raised my hand. That’s how I started at the channel. There would be a folder of some videos on the computer screen, and I’d upload the videos on a social network. At first, everything seemed very simple to me. But as time went on, my duties increased.”
“Troll factories” operate in many countries, and Georgia is no exception. According to my source, the government and the forces affiliated to them created powerful Internet trolling mechanisms, which are still used effectively nowadays. In Georgia, trolls seem to have an easier time misleading people. There are several reasons for this, from low education levels to lack of news literacy.
“I remember each of my Facebook accounts very well,” my source recalled. “I’d been trying to set up each profile for 2 weeks and it was a requirement that all those profiles be completely different from one another. My first profile was a Georgian migrant woman over 50, the second one was a middle-aged taxi driver, and the third one was a beautiful young girl.”
With these false profiles, my source and his team worked around the clock to mislead the public.
“We were sitting at personal computers located in a large space. We were up to 20 people around my age, no contact with one another, only working on the Internet in groups. This included several large Facebook groups where at least five of us were moderators:
• We shared various misinformation.
• We wrote comments about them.
• We attacked contrary-minded people or websites.
• We had this special word: “Apocalypse”. We used it if a member of an opposition party gained some goodwill in society, or non-governmental initiatives got public praise. The purpose of the “apocalypse” was to sow doubt and make people see this story from a different angle.”
With these methods, the trolls worked day and night, not just from the office. He continued:
“I worked all the time and everywhere using a personal computer at the office, my laptop at home and on my cell phone when I was outside. There were no weekends. On holidays our work doubled. We were paid wages as cash in hand and the reason for that is probably clear.”
So why did my source quit his job?
“While working there, I never had the feeling that I was doing a bad thing. I actually only thought about it when I was holding a lit candle at my uncle’s grave on Easter and sharing false stories with my own hands.”
After this, his engagement with the troll factory ended.
The fact is that the people in charge of this job know the Georgian society very well. They know what kind of machinations are needed to achieve specific goals. Trolls are just one of the links in a big and continuous chain called “fake news”.
I hope that my anonymous source will weaken that long and solid chain and help the public understand the story he told me, who the trolls are, and in what ways they are trying to shape public opinion.
RESEARCH | ARTICLE © Jano Saginadze, University of Georgia, Tbilisi, Georgia