“Bermet” also worked as a troll for one of Kyrgyzstan’s leading political parties. Salaries differed according to experience: as a beginner, Bermet earned $180 a month.
“Our team consisted of 15 people, but we were just one part of a whole army,” Bermet says. “There were rumours that the party hired several more groups of trolls besides us. Our office was in an apartment in an elite building in Bishkek. The work began at 10am and ended at 6 or 7pm, but this was only at the beginning of the election campaign. Closer to the end of the campaign, there was a lot of work. Sometimes I had to write comments from home if I was given an assignment.”
Bermet and the rest of her team used Telegram to coordinate their work, and to discuss talking points or themes when it came to praising clients or targeting opponents. Team members who knew less about politics were given ready-made comments and texts to post, she says.
“When communicating with each other, we used two basic concepts – defence and attack,” Bermet says. “Defence means that you have to defend against [criticism] with positive comments. Attack was used when it was necessary to denigrate other parties and their candidates. We were sent photos and videos in advance, which we had to share online. We had to regularly make screenshots of all our posts and comments when reporting back.”
Bermet says that the main difficulties she faced were psychological, not technical. “During the elections, the online environment changed a lot, because no matter what social network I was on, trolls were fighting everywhere,” she says. “This war was fierce. If we wrote something positive about a party or a candidate, other fakes immediately tried to attack us.
“When I first started working, it was very difficult from a moral point of view. I did not feel comfortable with having to write things that were far from the truth so often. But we were told not to take it to heart, that it’s just a job.”
“A vaccine against fakes”
In Kyrgyzstan, the work of troll factories is not regulated, and there are no laws preventing their activities. But attempts have already been made to tighten control over online information.
In June 2020, Kyrgyzstan’s MPs approved a now-notorious draft law on disinformation, which was initiated by parliamentarian Gulshat Asylbayeva. According to the proposal, Kyrgyzstan’s culture ministry would gain the right to block internet sites without court approval, if it decided they had published false claims.
The bill prompted criticism from social media users, who argued that the new law could be used to restrict freedom of speech. As a result the then-president Sooronbai Jeenbekov sent the draft law back to parliament to be revised.
In the meantime, Kyrgyzstani journalists and activists are at the forefront of attempts to counter disinformation. Aidai Irgebayeva, an editor at news outlet Kloop.kg, told openDemocracy that her team maintains a database of fake accounts, which can be used to identify connections between trolls and expose them.
“Usually, fake accounts would appear and behave aggressively after anti-corruption investigations,” said Irgebayeva. “I started commenting beneath their posts that they were fakes, so that readers could identify them.” Before Irgebayeva and others intervened, she says, the majority of comments under a given article about a prominent politician or influential figure could have been left by fake accounts.
According to Bolot Temirov, editor-in-chief of the Factcheck.kg website, troll factories will remain popular until people learn how to analyse information themselves. So far, he says, fake accounts have been successful in directing the popular mood in Kyrgyzstan, by creating a distorted reality that many take to be real.
“How can you inflict the greatest damage on an enemy? By releasing false information about him and making him a monster in the eyes of other people,” Temirov says. “The trolls copied this style of manipulation from other countries. Creating the appearance of public opinion, trolls force their labels on people: this is white, this is black; this is an enemy, and this is a friend.
“We need to find a vaccine for this,” he says. “Our society must overcome the crisis and develop immunity against lies and manipulation.”
Print
Kamila Eshaliyeva | Radio Free (2020-11-16T23:00:00+00:00) Real fakes: how Kyrgyzstan’s troll factories work. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/16/real-fakes-how-kyrgyzstans-troll-factories-work/
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