Internet Research Agency Indictment

2018

Date: 16 February 2018 · Place: United States v. Internet Research Agency LLC · Saint Petersburg, Russia (Savushkina 55) · Figures: Robert Mueller, special counsel · Yevgeny Prigozhin, IRA financier · Mikhail Bystrov, IRA general director · thirteen named Russian nationals · Tags: ForeignFarms, Indictment, Astroturf 01. Thirteen Names On 16 February 2018 Special Counsel Robert Mueller unseals an indictment of thirteen Russian nationals and three companies including the Internet Research Agency, a Saint Petersburg operation funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin. The indictment details a multimillion-dollar operation to inflame American political discourse on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube from 2014 onward. The IRA had run American personas, organized real-world rallies in Texas and Florida from a building on Savushkina Street, bought ads in rubles, and operated meme pages on both political sides. 'Blacktivist,' 'Heart of Texas,' 'Being Patriotic,' all IRA. Some pages had hundreds of thousands of American followers. 02. The Memes Were Real The indictment includes screenshots of actual memes published by the IRA: Bernie Sanders captioned next to a coloring-book Hillary, Jesus arm-wrestling Satan over the 2016 election, Black Lives Matter graphics paired with anti-Clinton slogans. The work is competent. Some images are indistinguishable from organic American partisan memes of the same period. Prigozhin will eventually be indicted, sanctioned, ignore the case, fund the Wagner Group, and die in a plane crash in August 2023. The case is dismissed by the Justice Department in 2020 with the trial having never begun. The indictment remains the most detailed government accounting of a state-funded memetic operation against another democracy. Sources • United States v. Internet Research Agency LLC et al., D.D.C., indictment filed 16 February 2018 • Renee DiResta et al., 'The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,' New Knowledge report for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, December 2018 • Adrian Chen, 'The Agency,' New York Times Magazine, 2 June 2015