The Foreign Troll Farms Never Went Away

Before social media foreign subversion became a staple of partisan politics in the U.S., the first journalist to write about the topic for a big mainstream audience was Adrian Chen. He published a piece in The New York Times Magazine in June 2015. It was called “The Agency” and it told the story of the Internet Research Agency, the government-linked Russian troll farm which would become a centerpiece of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the long investigations that came after it. The IRA was owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner Group whose star would continue to rise over the next decade until he mounted an ill-fated rebellion against Moscow and later died “mysteriously” in a plane crash.