Disinformation Warfare and Troll Factories: History and Cases

Disinformation warfare and troll factories are today among the most studied instruments of confrontation between states, and they are not a new phenomenon: they consist of the organized production and dissemination of false or distorted information, carried out systematically by state or para-state apparatuses, in order to erode public trust, divide societies or influence political decisions. Their history goes back to the Cold War, but the emergence of mass social networks has turned them into an everyday threat, well documented by intelligence agencies and research centers.

Soviet dezinformatsiya: the doctrinal origin

The Soviet Union institutionalized disinformation (dezinformatsiya) as a discipline within the «active measures» (aktivnye meropriyatiya) carried out by Service A of the KGB's First Chief Directorate. This was not crude propaganda but long-haul operations combining leaks, document forgery, sympathetic media in third countries, and disinformation seeded in foreign press so that it appeared to have originated independently.

Operation INFEKTION

The best-documented case is Operation INFEKTION, launched in 1983: the KGB, through the Indian newspaper Patriot, published the false claim that HIV had been created in US military laboratories at Fort Detrick. The story, kept alive for years by Soviet and allied media, spread to more than eighty countries before the USSR itself, already in the process of dissolution, admitted in 1992 that the story had been fabricated. Historians such as Thomas Boghardt have reconstructed this operation from declassified Stasi and KGB documents.

The Internet Research Agency: the St. Petersburg troll factory

The term «troll factory» became popular following the Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in St. Petersburg and linked to businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin. In February 2018 special counsel Robert Mueller filed a formal indictment (United States v. Internet Research Agency LLC) against the organization and thirteen Russian nationals, documenting how hundreds of employees operated fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, posing as Americans to polarize public debate during the 2016 election, with a monthly budget that, according to the indictment, exceeded a million dollars.

• Creation of fake profiles impersonating local activists from different political persuasions.
• Purchase of targeted ads to amplify divisive content, as revealed by the US Congress investigation.
• Organization of real-world events on US soil coordinated from Russia.
• Exploitation of recommendation algorithms to maximize the organic reach of content.

Doppelgänger and post-2022 disinformation

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, researchers from EU DisinfoLab and the EEAS (European External Action Service) identified the Doppelgänger operation, which clones the design of legitimate European media websites — such as Der Spiegel, Le Parisien or The Guardian — to publish, on near-identical domains, fake news favorable to the Kremlin. Meta and the European Commission have sanctioned and blocked hundreds of domains linked to this network since 2022, and the EEAS itself attributes it to actors linked to the Russian state in its annual reports on FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) threats.

EUvsDisinfo and the European institutional response

The European Union created the East StratCom Task Force in 2015, whose public project EUvsDisinfo has since catalogued thousands of cases of pro-Russian disinformation, with open databases documenting narratives, sources and their spread across languages. Together with reports from the NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence in Riga, it is one of the most cited references by journalists and academic researchers.

Western strategic communication: a necessary distinction

It is important not to confuse these operations with the strategic communication (StratCom) units maintained by Western countries and NATO itself, whose declared mission is to counter hostile narratives and coordinate institutional messaging, not to fabricate fake identities on a mass scale. This distinction — acknowledged by analysts such as Ben Nimmo, now at Meta's global integrity team — remains subject to academic debate, but the documented difference between covert intoxication operations and open public communication campaigns remains relevant when assessing the legitimacy of each actor.

Impact and limits of the phenomenon

Measuring the real impact of these campaigns on election results or specific policy decisions remains a matter of academic controversy: studies such as those from the Oxford Internet Institute have documented the reach and volume of these networks, but are more cautious about establishing direct causality on voting behavior. What is firmly documented is the operational scale, budget and persistence over time of these apparatuses, as well as their ability to saturate public debate and erode trust in traditional media.