Prigozhin’s ‘troll factory’ may have turned against him in May

A network of online bots connected to tycoon Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “troll factory” sided with their creator until recently. But in May and June they reportedly began to turn on him, says independent news outlet Agentstvo, citing two experts who monitor troll activity on Twitter and Russian social networking site VKontakte.

Beginning in early May, around 13,000 of the troll factory bots stopped working for Prigozhin, said the creator of a project called Lovushka Povara (Chef’s Trap), who does not publicly disclose his name. According to this person, for the past few years the bots have “obviously worked for Prigozhin, but now, evidently, they don’t work for him because they write pointed and coordinated critiques of him.” Experts estimate that before May, there were around 15,000 bots supporting Prigozhin on VKontakte. Around 1,400 remain now.

Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University in South Carolina and a specialist in internet misinformation, says that the Twitter bots he knew about did not support Prigozhin during the recent rebellion — in fact, they criticized Prigozhin harshly. Linvill’s team monitors the activity of around 200 bots connected to the troll factory. 

One of the experts interviewed by Agentstvo suggested that Prigozhin could lose control of the troll factory.

Prigozhin reportedly recently dissolved his Patriot Media Group, which housed dozens of “news” sites and had become the home of his “troll factory.”