Two individuals armed with Molotov cocktails firebombed the building believed to house Russia’s infamous “troll factory” early Wednesday morning, according to the Moscow Times.
The two arsonists threw the homemade firebombs into the second-floor window of an office building located at 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg, catching the offices of Nevsky News on fire. An employee working in the office was able to put out the fire before it could spread.
The internet trolls, most of whom are in their 20s, are paid 41,000 rubles ($777) a month by Teka, also known as the Internet Research Agency, to flood the internet with blog posts and comments targeting the Kremlin’s adversaries, especially the U.S. and NATO. Many of the posts are vitriolic, and include gay and racial slurs.
55 Savushkina street is a relatively unimposing office building surrounding by equally bland Soviet-era apartments and newer office buildings. Behind the building’s uninteresting facade works an army of professional internet trolls, posting thousands of pieces of propaganda on several social media sites on behalf of the Kremlin.
Internet Research Agency’s salaries are considered quite high in Russia, meaning the organization rarely has trouble finding potential workers. That said, the trolls themselves are hardly educated propagandists.
“They were so stupid,” Marat Burkhardt, a former troll who was employed by Internet Research Agency for two months, told Adrian Chen, a New York Times reporter who wrote an expose on the organization last year. “You see these people with a lot of very hip tattoos, like they’re from Williamsburg. But they are stupid.”
Internet Research Agency is believed to be owned by Evgeny Prigozhin, a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The company is currently under a fraud investigation by police.
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