Jessikka Aro takes fight to Russian trolls over fake news and death threats

Meet Jessikka Aro, the 38-year-old who fled overseas amid death threats but is continuing her fight against Russia’s fake-news factories.

Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro, left, has received death threats after exposing the workings of the Internet Research Agency. Right: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

For Jessikka Aro, a good day at work is one without death threats.

Aro is the Finnish journalist who exposed the breadth and scale of the fake news coming out of a single Russian troll factory in St Petersburg. Suffice to say, the trolls were not pleased. Pretty much overnight the woman who exposed the crime became the victim. Now she’s taking the fight to the trolls.

“It’s an international smear campaign,” she says on the phone from Silicon Valley in California, where she has been trying to persuade social media companies that trolling and fake news is their problem.

“I receive death threats. Even some of my own friends have sent me death threats because they read the fake news that is written about me. They mock me and smear me. I’ve reported two of my friends to the police.

“My mother and my sister have become targets and have had to take serious security precautions. I fear for my life, which is part of the reason for this harassment and criminal activity. They want me to stop reporting on this.”

Exposing trolls

It started four years ago when Aro broadcast her first investigation into the troll factory on Finnish state TV and published articles in English, Finnish and Russian.

Building on earlier investigations by Russian journalists, Aro led the first Western film crew to find evidence that the innocuous-sounding Internet Research Agency was a branch of the Russian state. A security guard told them it was an “administrative building”, that they must stop taking pictures and leave.

The building known as the "troll factory" in St Petersburg. Picture: AP

In Russia, she explains, the designation is given by presidential decree only to sensitive sites, usually nuclear power plants or military bases, not research agencies in St Petersburg.

“The security guard basically outed the place,” she says laconically. “So that was useful.”

The organisation was funded by one of President Vladimir Putin’s associates, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman and restaurateur from St Petersburg known as “Putin’s chef”, who has since been indicted by the US for alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential elections. Between 300 and 400 people worked there, pumping out abuse and fake news around the clock.

Aro followed up advertisements for jobs there and was told they needed copywriters and social media managers who could generate content about news and politics in English and Russian, day and night.

This was where the campaigns of misinformation and hate were unleashed on the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election.

When Aro visited in 2014 their favoured topic was Ukraine, which Russia had invaded. The editorial line the trolls took was that the mainstream media was ignoring the truth, which was that a benevolent Russia was saving Ukraine from its neo-Nazi leaders.

Other narratives were that there weren’t any Russian soldiers in Ukraine at all. If there was a war, which there wasn’t, it was being waged by the US, the EU and NATO. And for good measure they spread memes and pictures on social media attacking Ukrainian leaders and activists.

The aim, says Aro, was to shut down negative debate, sow doubt about where the truth lay and intimidate anti-Russian voices online. It worked.

“So many people told me they stopped discussing Russia-related issues online because they became the target of trolls and death threats.

“We know from leaked strategy papers that the entire aim of this campaign of disinformation was to twist the debate and make online comment more pro-Russian. Some people told me they left social media completely because they couldn’t deal with the abuse any more.”

This is what social media trolls and fake news cause in my family's life:

"my mother and sister had to take security precautions".

To mention just ONE of the many sad consequences.

But my work continues!

Big story today in the Times. pic.twitter.com/IYMMKwqJCv

— Jessikka Aro (@JessikkaAro) May 29, 2019

Russian retribution

Aro, 38, knew how they felt. Social media and the web were now awash with conspiracy theories about her and stories mocking her articles and credentials as a journalist.

She was, it was claimed, variously in the pay of the CIA, Finnish security services and NATO. She was an American propagandist conducting information warfare against law-abiding Finnish citizens. She was a threat to Finnish national security. She was denounced as a drug user, a drug dealer, a brain-damaged whore, or a combination of all three.

“They managed to incite hatred of me in so many people who think it’s all true. The Finnish police estimate that I face a threat of impulsive violence if I’m simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“It was when my former friend commented on Facebook that I used to be a normal person but had turned into a shit that I realised the power of fake news and how serious this brainwashing is.”

It was sufficiently serious that she felt compelled to leave her home in Helsinki and move abroad for a couple of years.

She still takes security precautions, as do her mother and sister, who became targets after her sister defended her on social media. Three people were convicted last year in the Finnish courts for crimes against Aro, including stalking and defamation, but Aro is angry that it should come to this.

Open letter to FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEI Jack Dorsey and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki - from me and three other disinformation victims @lenpoz@tunkhin80 and @ethan_Joesph16

Please read and RT - because we all have the right to safe and crime-free social media ❤ pic.twitter.com/8q9DLhoXLZ

— Jessikka Aro (@JessikkaAro) May 9, 2019

She’s frustrated that it’s left to overstretched local police to deal with a crime that would be better dealt with by being stamped out at source. And she’s frustrated that the social media companies are apt to hide their failure to do so behind talk of the importance of protecting freedom of speech.

Google, which owns YouTube, was heavily criticised recently for how long it took the company to take down videos of the Christchurch mosque shootings.

The father of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old girl from northwest London who committed suicide in 2017, believes Instagram was partly to blame for her death after he found material about depression and suicide on her account.

The chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Britain said social networks were acting only in the wake of tragedy. Instagram, owned by Facebook, announced this year that it would ban graphic images of self-harming. And last year British MPs were advised by parliament’s health and wellbeing service that shutting down their Twitter accounts could be the only way of avoiding the constant threats and abuse.

“This has nothing to do with freedom of speech,” says Aro. “This is not normal political ­discussion. Saying ‘Jessikka is a crack whore who needs to be killed’ is a crime in many different countries.”

The troll factory in St Petersburg, which spreads fake news and hate, was funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin (left), an associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin (right). Picture: AP

Timid tech giants

Confident, passionate and highly articulate, Aro speaks fluent English and Russian. She has tried reporting her abusers to Facebook and YouTube but mostly receives an automated reply saying that they haven’t violated community standards.

The reality of moderating, she argues, can be too complex for an algorithm and requires human brains.

“Some of this content violates both their own community standards and Finnish legislation. By not removing it, they are enabling state-sponsored Russian troll operations.”

She accuses the companies of putting profit before anything else. Facebook has even profited from the trolls, she claims, because they pay for visibility and sponsored posts to attack her.

“Their moderation and security guarantee goes against their business model, basically. But if they’re going to do business in our countries, if they’re going to take our data and use it to make money, then they should also take some responsibility.

“It’s wrong, and illegal, to send death threats to anyone. They should have put an end to this years ago, but it’s still going on. They don’t seem interested in investigating it voluntarily unless the US Senate or special counsel Robert Mueller demands that they do.”

In January Aro was informed by the US State Department that she was to receive an International Women of Courage award. It was to be presented to her by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and first lady Melania Trump.

A few weeks later the award was mysteriously rescinded, with the State Department citing a “regrettable error”. Aro suspects that someone in Washington, DC, realised she had been critical of US President Donald Trump on social media or didn’t like her raising the issue of Russian trolls, given the role they were found to have had in influencing his election. Either way, Aro didn’t get the award and is carrying on with her work despite the abuse.

“This is not some abstract threat to freedom of speech or just to one individual,” she argues.

“It’s a national security threat. It is one of Russia’s ways of conducting hybrid warfare against the West and, yes, it’s an emergency.

“Trolls and fake news are inciting hatred against religions and minorities, and being used to ­mobilise real people into taking action.”

Dealing with the abuse and the death threats have taken up time that she would rather have spent being a journalist, but she has no intention of covering anything else. She specialises in Russia, she points out, angrily. It’s her area of expertise. She has lived and worked there and speaks the language.

“And I have the constitutional right to report on this. I’m just doing what I love. If someone has a problem with that, they need to deal with the police.”

The Times