Internet Research Agency (IRA) (2013–2016)
A Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg ran hundreds of fake American personas across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, buying ads and organizing around the 2016 U.S. election. The U.S. Justice Department indicted the IRA and its owner Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2018.
Facebook and Twitter removed accounts; Congress subpoenaed tech executives but passed no targeted law.
Platforms built election-integrity teams and ad-transparency tools, and the IRA became the template for foreign influence operations.
The playbook — fake Western personas pushing polarized content — now runs on AI generation, removing the need for a large human staff writing fluent English.
