Effort to Expose Russia’s ‘Troll Army’ Draws Vicious Retaliation
By ANDREW HIGGINS

HELSINKI, Finland — Seeking to shine some light into the dark world of Internet trolls, a journalist with Finland’s national broadcaster asked members of her audience to share their experience of encounters with Russia’s “troll army,” a raucous and often venomous force of online agitators.

The response was overwhelming, though not in the direction that the journalist, Jessikka Aro, had hoped.

As she expected, she received some feedback from people who had clashed with aggressively pro-Russian voices online. But she was taken aback, and shaken, by a vicious retaliatory campaign of harassment and insults against her and her work by those same pro-Russian voices.

“Everything in my life went to hell thanks to the trolls,” said Ms. Aro, a 35-year-old investigative reporter with the social media division of Finland’s state broadcaster, Yle Kioski.

Abusive online harassment is hardly limited to pro-Russian Internet trolls. Ukraine and other countries at odds with the Kremlin also have legions of aggressive avengers on social media.

But pro-Russian voices have become such a noisy and disruptive presence that both NATO and the European Union have set up special units to combat what they see as a growing threat not only to civil discourse but to the well-being of Europe’s democratic order and even to its security.

This “information war,” said Rastislav Kacer, a veteran diplomat who served as Slovakia’s ambassador to Washington and at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, “is just part of a bigger struggle.” While not involving bloodshed, he added, it “is equally as dangerous as more conventional hostile action.”

For Ms. Aro, the abuse increased sharply last year when, following up on reports in the opposition Russian news media, she visited St. Petersburg to investigate the workings of a Russian “troll factory.” The big office churns out fake news and comment, particularly on Ukraine, and floods websites and social media with denunciations of Russia’s critics.

In response to her reporting, pro-Russian activists in Helsinki organized a protest outside the headquarters of Yle, accusing it of being a troll factory itself. Only a handful of people showed up.

At the same time, Ms. Aro has been peppered with abusive emails, vilified as a drug dealer on social media sites and mocked as a delusional bimbo in a music video posted on YouTube.

“There are so many layers of fakery you get lost,” said Ms. Aro, who was awarded the Finnish Grand Prize for Journalism in March.

As Ms. Aro’s experiences illustrate, Finland, a country at the center of Russia’s concerns about NATO’s expansion toward its borders, has emerged as a particularly active front in the information wars. A member of the European Union with an 830-mile-long border with Russia, Finland has stayed outside the United States-led military alliance but, unnerved by Russian military actions in Ukraine and its saber-rattling in the Baltic Sea, has expanded cooperation with NATO and debated whether to apply for full membership.

Public opinion is deeply divided, making Finland a prime target for a campaign by Russia.

“Their big thing is to keep Finland out of NATO,” said Saara Jantunen, a researcher at the Finnish Defense Forces in Helsinki, who last year published a book in Finland entitled “Info-War.” She said that she, too, had been savaged on social media, sometimes by the same and apparently fake commentators who have hounded Ms. Aro.

“They fill the information space with so much abuse and conspiracy talk that even sane people start to lose their minds,” she added.

Europe’s main response so far has been to try to counter outright lies. In November, the European Union launched “Disinformation Review,” a weekly compendium of pro-Kremlin distortions and untruths.

But facts have been powerless against a torrent of abuse and ridicule targeted at European journalists, researchers and others labeled NATO stooges.

Pro-Russian activists insist that they are merely exercising their right to free speech, and that they do not take money or instructions from Moscow.

The most abusive messages against Ms. Aro were mostly sent anonymously or from accounts set up under fake names on Facebook and other social media.

One of her most vocal critics in Finland, however, has openly declared his identity. He is Johan Backman, a tireless supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia who highlights the blurred lines between state-sponsored harassment and the expression of strongly held personal views.

Fluent in Russian, Mr. Backman now spends much of his time in Moscow, appearing regularly in the Russian news media and at conferences in Russia as “a human rights defender.” He also serves as the representative in Northern Europe for the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a state-funded research group led by a Soviet-era intelligence officer.

Mr. Backman, who also represents the Donetsk People’s Republic, the breakaway state set up with Russian support in eastern Ukraine, denied targeting Ms. Aro as part of any “information war.” Rather, he insisted that Russia was itself the victim of a campaign of disinformation and distortion conducted by the West.

In a recent interview in Moscow, he said that Ms. Aro was part of this campaign and that she had tried to curtail the freedom of speech of Russia’s supporters in Finland by labeling them as “Russian trolls.” All the same, Mr. Backman added, her complaints about being targeted for abuse “have been very beneficial for Russia” because they have made others think twice about criticizing Moscow.

“She says she is a victim, and nobody wants to be a victim,” he said. “This changed the atmosphere in the journalistic community.”

Mr. Backman said he used his own private means to fund his activities in support of what he described as an “entirely defensive” campaign by Russia to counter Western propaganda. His activities, however, invariably follow Moscow’s political and geopolitical script, particularly on NATO, which he regularly denounces as a tool for United States military occupation.

Aside from NATO, Mr. Backman’s biggest bugbear of late has been Ms. Aro and the “Russo-phobic” tendencies that she, in his view, represents.

Just days after Ms. Aro made her first appeal in September 2014 for information about Russian trolls, Mr. Backman told Russian People’s Line, a nationalist Russian website, and other media that she was a “well-known assistant of American and Baltic special services.”

Around the same time, she received a call late at night on her cellphone from a number in Ukraine. Nobody spoke, and all she could hear was gunfire. This was followed by text and email messages denouncing her as a “NATO whore” and a message purporting to come from her father — who died 20 years ago — saying he was “watching her.”

The hardest blow, Ms. Aro said, came early this year when a Finnish-language news site, MVLehti.net, which is based in Spain and mostly focuses on vilifying immigrants, dug up and published court records that showed she had been convicted of using illegal amphetamines in 2004. She had been fined 300 euros.

The website’s headline: “NATO’s information expert Jessikka Aro turned out to be a convicted drug dealer.” It also posted photographs of Ms. Aro dancing in a slinky outfit at a nightclub in Bangkok.

Mr. Backman requested and received Ms. Aro’s old case file from the court shortly before the website published the documents. He denied passing them on to the site.

The false claim that Ms. Aro was a drug dealer triggered an unusual open letter signed by more than 20 Finnish editors infuriated by what they denounced as the “poisoning of public debate” with “insults, defamation and outright lies.” The Finnish police began an investigation into the website for harassment and hate speech.

“I don’t know if these people are acting on orders from Russia, but they are clearly what Lenin called ‘useful idiots,’” said Mika Pettersson, the editor of Finland’s national news agency and an organizer of the editors’ open letter. “They are playing into Putin’s pocket. Nationalist movements in Finland and other European countries want to destabilize the European Union and NATO, and this goes straight into Putin’s narrative.”

Ilja Janitskin, the founder and head of MVLehti, who is based in Barcelona, Spain, said in response to emailed questions that he had no connection with Russia other than his surname. His political views, he said, are closer to those of Donald J. Trump, not Mr. Putin.

He added that he had become interested in Ms. Aro only after she accused his website of “distributing Russian propaganda.”

Like Mr. Backman, he denied receiving any money from Russian sources, insisting that his website, which in just 18 months has become one of Finland’s most widely read online news sources, finances itself from advertising and donations by readers.

Ms. Aro acknowledged that she had used amphetamines regularly in her early 20s but dismissed as a “total lie” claims that she had been or is a drug dealer.

“They get inside your head, and you start thinking: If I do this, what will the trolls do next?” she said.

芬蘭女記者探內幕踩雷 被俄網軍瘋狂霸凌

俄羅斯網軍近年來在歐洲引發許多人反感，這些網軍在歐洲各網站和論壇上力挺俄國，不惜以各種假消息幫俄國宣傳，還攻擊騷擾反對者。這些網軍自稱來自民間，絕沒有向政府拿錢。芬蘭國營廣播電視台Yle調查記者艾若想調查俄國網軍運作內幕，徵求心得，不料捅到馬蜂窩，俄國網軍鋪天蓋地的攻勢，嚇得她花容失色。

紐約時報五月卅一日在頭版報導卅五歲的艾若的遭遇，她表示：「拜網軍所賜，我生活中的一切宛如人間煉獄。」

艾若徵求心得後不久，手機接到一通來電，號碼顯示來自烏克蘭。艾若用俄語問對方：「請問你哪位？我在聽你說話。」對方沒答腔，只有開槍的聲音。

後來，罵她是「北約蕩婦」的簡訊和電郵湧入；更誇張的是今年春天有一封簡訊偽裝來自艾若往生廿年的父親，宣稱「盯著她看」。

艾若最感到難受的攻擊來自一個設在西班牙的芬蘭文網站，找出她十二年前因持有安非他命被罰三百歐元的往事，改寫成「北約資安專家艾若竟是毒販」的貼文，並附上艾若穿著性感，在曼谷夜店熱舞的照片。把艾若拍成一個金髮傻妹的影音，在YouTube上流傳。

紐時報導，烏克蘭及其他與俄國不對盤的國家都有網軍，透過網路發動的人身攻擊也很猛烈。但是親俄的網軍殺傷力大到北約與歐盟成立特別單位因應，因為俄國網軍的攻勢不僅牽涉到言論自由，更危及歐洲的民主秩序與安全。

曾任斯洛伐克駐美和北約總部大使的卡奇表示：「這場資訊戰只是更大規模戰鬥的一環，雖然沒有流血，卻和傳統戰一樣危險。」

今年三月，艾若獲頒芬蘭新聞採訪大獎。她說，親俄網軍彷彿全天候跟蹤她在網路上的一舉一動，「有時候恐懼感油然而生」。但艾若表示沒在怕：「我能做的就是把發生在我身上的遭遇全部報導出來，這也是我的觀眾想看的。我不想被描述成哭哭啼啼的受害者，雖然有時候我會哭，但絕大多數時候，我就做我的報導。」

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/world/europe/russia-finland-nato-trolls.html

2016-06-01．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯張佑生