Putin’s Trolls

“Timely exposé of Russia’s vast disinformation campaign from a Finnish journalist persecuted for her persistent reporting of its brazen abuses…the author is to be commended for both her journalism and for her creation of a damning portrait of Putin and his autocratic, manipulative regime.”—KIRKUS

“Jessikka Aro has written a frightening and fascinating book, chronicling Russian information warfare in irrefutable detail. Exposing Putin’s trolls is dangerous, vital, and ultimately heroic work.”—ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER

“By exposing Putin’s institutionalized trolling operations, Jessikka Aro has gone where no one has had the courage to go before and has done so at great peril. Ms. Aro has done the world a huge service by showing us how these tactics work so we can better defend ourselves going forward.”
—BILL BROWDER, author, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

Putin’s Trolls is a chilling account of Russian information warfare, shedding light on the individuals and organizations behind the Kremlin’s coordinated, military-style social media psy-ops against the Western world.

In this courageous and unflinching book, award-winning journalist Jessikka Aro interweaves her own dramatic story as a target of Russian social media propaganda with accounts from many internationally known critics of the Kremlin, who share their own stories of being targeted by Russia’s multifaceted cyber warfare campaigns. Among those featured are Bill Browder, author of Red Notice, Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative community Bellingcat, and news anchor Liz Wahl, who famously resigned on air from the Russian propaganda network, RT.

As Jessikka began to investigate the impact of the Kremlin’s troll operations outside of Russia, she learned that private citizens in many other countries were being victimized by Kremlin-designed information campaigns. These actions were frequently conducted through an organized “troll factory” led by Russia’s security and intelligence apparatus, using unregulated social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Many of the disinformation campaigns were centered around the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent occupation of the Crimean Peninsula.

A real-life thriller, Putin’s Trolls is a groundbreaking expose of Russia’s information warfare techniques, which, as we saw in the 2016 presidential election, are a threat to the democratic underpinnings of Western society.

Jessikka Aro is an award-winning reporter with Yle, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, specializing in Russia, extremism and information warfare. In 2014 and 2015, she published a series of articles on pro-Kremlin social media trolls and their influence outside of Russia’s borders. Due to her investigations, Jessikka became the target of a severe and still ongoing international propaganda and hate speech campaign. which she recounts in Putin’s Trolls. Originally published in Finnish, the book has been translated into several languages. In 2019, the US State Department awarded Jessikka the International Women of Courage Award, but the award was mysteriously rescinded by the Trump administration, allegedly due to her social media criticism of then President Trump. Jessikka lives in Helsinki, Finland.