Putin's Trolls: A Hybrid Memoir

Putin’s Trolls is a chilling account of Russian information warfare, shedding light on the individuals and organizations behind the Kremlin’s coordinated, military-style social media psy-ops against the Western world.

In this courageous and unflinching book, award-winning journalist Jessikka Aro interweaves her own dramatic story as a target of Russian social media propaganda with accounts from many internationally known critics of the Kremlin, who share their own stories of being targeted by Russia’s multifaceted cyber warfare campaigns. Among those featured are Bill Browder, author of Red Notice, Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative community Bellingcat, and news anchor Liz Wahl, who famously resigned on air from the Russian propaganda network, RT.

As Jessikka began to investigate the impact of the Kremlin’s troll operations outside of Russia, she learned that private citizens in many other countries were being victimized by Kremlin-designed information campaigns. These actions were frequently conducted through an organized “troll factory” led by Russia’s security and intelligence apparatus, using unregulated social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Many of the disinformation campaigns were centered around the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent occupation of the Crimean Peninsula.

A real-life thriller, Putin’s Trolls is a groundbreaking expose of Russia’s information warfare techniques, which, as we saw in the 2016 presidential election, are a threat to the democratic underpinnings of Western society.