Maintaining the “elves” in Vilnius and Tbilisi cost the US sponsor Free Russia (*aggressor country) Foundation €4 million a year until the Lithuanian office left the chat

In 2013, Novaya Gazeta first reported on the existence “troll factories” — a network of interconnected companies that write comments and posts praising the Russian government. Later, the whole world learned about the activities of the Olgins: in 2016, they were accused of interference in the American presidential electionand in 2018 they became the reason for the introduction of sanctions against the now deceased owner of the “factory” – Evgenia Prigozhina.

The Russian liberal opposition has traditionally treated pro-government bots on the Internet with ironic condescension, mocking their small salaries and too rude style, similar to the rhetoric of state television channels.

The SVTV editors have at their disposal an archive of hundreds of thousands of files, confirming that the Anti-Corruption Foundation has adopted the tool of paid comments into its arsenal. For the last two years, a network of offices has been operating in Vilnius and Tbilisi, in which about 200 employees are engaged in the monotonous dissemination of propaganda for money. The organization spent millions of dollars for these purposes.

SVTV explains how this network works.

We received this information from a former employee of the bot farm in the form of an investigative text file and a data archive with hundreds of thousands of screenshots and internal documents. You can confirm the reliability of this data yourself by this link.

According to a former employee of the bot farm, the director of the Free Russia (*aggressor country) Foundation for the South Caucasus Egor Kuroptev, the coordinator for the South Caucasus Anton Mikhalchuk and IT specialist Pavel Elizarov, as well as the vice president for international advocacy, are participating in the implementation of the project Vladimir Milov and fund director Natalia Arno. The latter heads the non-profit organization Reforum, registered in Lithuania, which is hired by the Free Russia (*aggressor country) Foundation to carry out contracts for the bot farm. It is Reforum that signs contracts with performers.

The bot factory is run by the former head of the Moscow headquarters Navalny Oleg Stepanov. The former lawyer of Navalny’s headquarters in Ufa, Fyodor Telin, is responsible for monitoring – it is he who sends posts to employees under which they should leave comments. The director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Ivan Zhdanov, is also involved in resolving key issues. The activities of the bot farm are actively supported by politician Vladimir Milov.

Officially, the supplier provides the customer with “SMM consulting” services. This includes creating and publishing texts on social networks, as well as other “related services.” It is separately noted that the customer can transmit his orders, including orally. The cost of an hour of work for an “elf” is 10 euros. The contract is concluded for nine months with the possibility of termination by the customer subject to a 15-day notice.

According to a former employee of the bot farm, depending on the activity, each employee earns from 1,200 to 1,800 euros. The amount of funding for salaries of FBK bot farm employees alone is estimated at between 2.88 million and 4.32 million euros per year. At the same time, the level of costs for salaries to the management of the bot farm, office rental, “account hijacking”, IT support and the like is unknown. Most employees work from the office.

When hired, the “elf” also undertakes to maintain complete confidentiality both during the contract and upon its completion. Confidential information is considered non-public information related to technological solutions, business and financial affairs of the customer. This includes all Reforum documentation, specifications, databases and tools, as well as development, business, financing and service pricing strategies.

Bots must publish at least 120 comments or posts (including those with illustrations approved by the coordinator) per day, which will not be deleted by the administrators of the pages on which they are posted. The content of publications is provided by the bot farm coordinator by sending shift work files – internal documents with examples of ready-made comments on current topics. They can be copied in full or rewritten in your own words.

The Elves work according to an algorithm codenamed Lorien. According to this document, employees use the Signal messenger for work correspondence, and work on VKontakte is always carried out with the VPN turned on – it can be issued by the coordinator.

To open shifts and request fake accounts, employees use a Telegram bot. During a work shift, management sends the “elves” posts under which they must leave comments.

Employees report on the work done with screenshots of comments and likes on the most successful publications. Reactions are the main criterion for the effectiveness of an “elf”. The management of the bot farm encourages competition among employees. There is a permanent rating, the leaders of which are rewarded, including financially. More efficient employees are also given the opportunity to take on more shifts. For absence from work, the number of “elf” shifts is limited.

“Elves” work exclusively with VPN enabled and in incognito mode. The administration of social networks regularly bans fake accounts for suspicious activity and anti-government publications. While checking the information in this investigation, we discovered many blocked pages that actually left comments under posts from the internal documents of the bot farm.

According to a former “elf,” the “hijacking” of accounts raises ethical questions for some employees. Previously, these pages belonged to real people, which means the work of the bot farm could expose them to criminal cases in Russia (*aggressor country).

The management of the bot factory responds to such questions by saying that it recommends changing user names. However, the mobile numbers of the old owners remain linked to the accounts – law enforcement agencies can use this to identify the user.

Despite the fact that the management of the bot farm provides the “elves” with dozens of examples of comments, they often almost completely copy each other. Sometimes wording overlaps even between two different employees who work the same shift.

In addition to constant criticism of the war, the bot farm employees also have third-party tasks, “special campaigns.” Usually these are posts of the same type related to the initiatives of FBK or its friendly structures. “Elves” actively participated in the “Free Navalny” campaign: they called for overthrowing the regime and going to rallies in Russia (*aggressor country). Note that all employees of the bot farm live in Vilnius or Tbilisi.

“Elves” also love to pay attention to the experience of protest in more democratic countries. They reproach the Russians for inertia and indifference.

In the training manuals of the “elves” you can also often find the topic of foreign policy. The coordinators describe in detail how exactly it is necessary to cover the pardon of Roman Protasevich in Belarus, the G7 summit in Japan, the crisis in Artsakh (which farm employees call Karabakh), the resumption of air traffic between Russia (*aggressor country) and Georgia, the leak of documents from the Pentagon, and for some reason – Donald Trump.

Sometimes bot comments differ in meaning from the instructions sent by the coordinator. There are also cases when one employee comments on the same event in the opposite way from different accounts. For example, from one account she approves of the act of Darya Trepova, who undermined the propagandist Vladlen Tatarsky, and from another she claims that the girl was framed by the FSB.

In March 2023, the bot farm launched a “special campaign” to criticize Ksenia Sobchak. In the project manual, it is called “an unprincipled, cynical and deceitful project of the Kremlin.” Sobchak is accused of agitating to go to military registration and enlistment offices at the height of mobilization, as well as of promoting the Kremlin’s theses under the guise of an independent oppositionist or journalist.

The former editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy also got it from the “elves” Alexey Venediktov. In March 2023 he published photograph of a letter from Leonid Volkov in support of the oligarchs Mikhail Fridman And Petra Avena. This forced Volkova admit authenticity of the document and resign as head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. For this, the bots were instructed to call Venediktov “venal scum” and accuse him of receiving money from the mayor’s office.

At the height of the scandal, the FBK “elves” switched to supporting Leonid Volkov. They spread the thesis in public news comments that Volkov “admitted his mistake, apologized and left his post,” and “only those who do nothing make no mistakes.” Later, these theses began to be repeated word for word by well-known FBK supporters, such as Victor Shenderovich, Dmitry Kolezev And Fedor Krasheninnikov.

Maxim Katz, who is in a long-standing conflict with FBK, is called a “moron” and a “pocket” politician by opposition bots.

Sometimes they complain about poor working conditions, delayed salaries, the inability to take sick leave or vacation at the expense of the employer, and also that the project has turned into a bot farm.

Due to burnout from monotonous routine work and delays in salaries, some employees of the Vilnius office demanded “more humane working conditions” from management. Soon after a working call on this topic, the “elves” were told that there was not enough money to finance the project. All employees of this work group with contracts until the end of 2023 were notified of dismissal within 30 days.

“Our task is not to denigrate the activities of FBK, personally Alexei Navalny, whom we treat with unconditional respect, or other leaders of the organization. However, we consider it incorrect to artificially inflate the popularity indicators of FBK on the Internet (and positive and negative comments affect not only the quality of audience perception, but also often the quantitative indicators of getting into the recommendations of social networks, views, likes, monetization, etc.) and so much and artificially lowering the performance of other media influencers critical of the Kremlin,” the former “elves” wrote in their investigative document.

We do not know who exactly from the leadership of FBK decided to create an “elf factory”, but its secret existence causes irreparable damage to the foundation’s reputation. Under the leadership of Alexei Navalny, the organization for many years built its image on uncovering corruption and crimes of officials – and now regularly withholds publicly important information from its supporters for its own political gain. […]

The Tbilisi office, according to its employees, did not receive tasks to discredit the disloyal FBK opposition. Tasks to discredit could have been assigned personally by Stepanov to Lithuanian employees. At the same time, our sources suggested that individual employees of the bot farm in Georgia could carry out attacks from the FBK, since one of the leaders of the Tbilisi office is the ex-head of Navalny’s Headquarters in Chelyabinsk, Boris Zolotarevsky. He, in turn, headed the headquarters of Ivan Zhdanov in the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections.

Another connection with FBK is the bot farm’s support for the Free Navalny campaign. At the same time, the “elves” also collaborated with other political forces, in particular, the “Feminist Anti-War Resistance,” helping it promote anti-war posts in the public pages of mothers and wives mobilized last fall.

The creators of the bot farm tried to offer their services to the Pskov Yabloko, but due to too crude an imitation of popular support, Lev Shlosberg refused to cooperate a day after the launch of the campaign.

The SVTV material provides slightly outdated data on the production of comments: the current norm is no longer 120, but 130 remarks per day within the framework of the rate. Prices in Georgia are lower than in Lithuania: the Georgian rate is 800 euros per month for daily work and implies the opportunity to earn more than a thousand euros with increased workload.

The project management strives to save on employees by evaluating not just the comments they wrote, but also the number of likes under them: an effective result is considered to be at least 5 likes, due to which the “monitors” (employees responsible for selecting topics and publics for comments in VK) select mostly neutral urban communities, since it is too easy to get likes in opposition publics.

Separately, the “elf factory” is now trying to develop a project of opposition memes, which, however, our sources dryly characterize as “unfunny.” The content of bots in general does not strive for originality, since experiments with style and images may not receive the necessary likes: this is what causes bots to copy similar texts. This also explains the coincidence of bot texts with posts of public opinion leaders like Viktor Shenderovich: the “elves” often used other people’s posts that had already been written. Moreover, some comments by the “elves” were directly copied from Maxim Katz’s Twitter as having already proven their effectiveness.

The bot farms created after the start of the war initially tried to work not only on VK, but also on Odnoklassniki, YouTube and Zen, but eventually curtailed their activities on these sites because they could not achieve efficiency there.

The only continuation of working with YouTube was placing links to a number of videos there in VK, as well as lengthy viewing of videos on the portal for their promotion in recommendations. The videos were taken from a network of related bot farms project “Elfbot”which includes a number of regional opposition channels openly promoted by FRF.