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November 5, 2019 03:30 am

Undercover Reporter Reveals Life In a Polish Troll Farm

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It is as common an occurrence on Polish Twitter as you are likely to get: a pair of conservative activists pouring scorn on the country's divided liberal opposition. "I burst out laughing!" writes Girl from oliborz, a self-described "traditionalist" commenting on a newspaper story about a former campaign adviser to Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron coming to Warsaw to address a group of liberal activists. "The opposition has nothing to offer. That's why they use nonsense to pull the wool over people's eyes," replies Magda Rostocka, whose profile tells her almost 4,400 followers she is "left-handed with her heart on the right." In reality, neither woman existed. Both accounts were run by the paid employees of a small marketing company based in the city of Wrocaw in southwest Poland. But what the employee pretending to be Magda Rostocka did not know is that the colleague pretending to be Girl from oliborz was an undercover reporter who had infiltrated the company, giving rare insight into the means by which fake social media accounts are being used by private firms to influence unsuspecting voters and consumers. The undercover reporter, Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz, spent six months this year working at Cat@Net, which describes itself as an "ePR agency comprising specialists who build a positive image of companies, private individuals and public institutions -- mostly in social media." "One of Pruszkiewicz's responsibilities was to operate anonymous accounts with instructions to promote content produced by TVP, Poland's state broadcaster, which is widely reviled by critics for its extreme partisanship and hate speech directed against minority groups," the report says. "'It would be great if you posted positive comments about the government's subsidy for TVP and the television license fee,' read an email from her manager." A London-based thinktank found that Cat@Net accounts created up to 10,000 posts in defense of TVP, with a potential reach of 15 million views. The agency also helped a recently elected member of the Polish parliament for the leftwing Democratic Left Alliance party. "Cat@Net's leftwing accounts promoted the politician's candidacy to the European Parliament in elections held in May this year, with at least 90 different accounts circulating and responding to his social media posts," reports The Guardian. "The company's rightwing accounts would then oppose the leftwing accounts, generating conflict and traffic, thereby drawing attention to the candidate." In response to the article, Cat@Net strongly denied it was a "troll farm": "The company's field of activity is the outsourcing of marketing operations to social media. We communicate accurate information, speak for our clients, and promote their products and services like any other agency of its kind."

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