Authors

Sergei Poliakov¹; Florian Toepfl¹; Ilya Yablokov²;  ¹ University of Passau, Germany;  ² The University of Sheffield, UK

Discussion

Over the past five years, a vibrant body of research has emerged on Russia’s so-called Internet Research Agency (IRA), which was largely focused, however, on analysing the content published by the IRA (see e.g., Ehrett et al., 2021, Golovchenko et al., 2020,  Zang et al., 2021). By contrast, no academic study has scrutinized how the IRA – or the network of entities that is commonly referred to as IRA – functions as an organisation. For instance, we have virtually no systematic knowledge about how the “IRA” is internally organised, about how it changed over the past decade, and about the work routines and social identities of its workforce. Our research project is grounded in analysis of secondary data and qualitative interviews with media experts and disinformation workers who formerly worked for the IRA. In the present paper, we focus on the moral justifications of disinformation producers (Ong & Cabañes, 2019). We assume that “political trolling” might have become a part of Russian professional culture, i.e. to a certain degree “normalised” (Ong & Cabanes, 2019, p. 5773). We aim to interpret our findings against recent studies that have considered disinformation work in the context of production studies (Ong & Cabanes, 2019) and political astroturfing (Han et al., 2015).