Russia's Internet Research Agency Held a Reddit AMA — Mostly With Its Own Sockpuppets
December 2017
Russia's Internet Research Agency staged a Reddit 'Ask Me Anything' through fake Black-activist front sites, then answered questions largely posed by its own accounts — even copying queries a Daily Beast reporter had sent in advance to fill out the thread.
What happened
In late 2017 the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA) — the St. Petersburg troll farm later indicted by the Mueller investigation — ran one of the more surreal documented influence operations on Reddit: an 'Ask Me Anything' (AMA) session conducted largely with itself. The episode, reported by The Daily Beast in November 2018, illustrated both the IRA's exploitation of Reddit and the operation's frequent ineptitude.
In October 2017 the IRA, operating through two fake Black-rights front websites it controlled — blackmattersus.com and donotshoot.us — announced a public AMA and emailed reporters soliciting advance questions, promising to answer queries from the press and public. When the session finally materialized in December 2017, discovered by independent blogger Jeremy Massler, it ran on a subreddit devoted to impromptu AMAs under an account called 'TrollsOfficial,' which opened with the line: 'We are "Russian Trolls," ask us anything!'
The thread was a hall of mirrors. The IRA was effectively interviewing itself: of the 14 questions in the session, five were copy-pasted verbatim from a list that a Daily Beast reporter had earlier emailed to the troll operation. In other words, the troll farm had solicited questions from journalists specifically so it would have material to answer in a Reddit AMA whose questioner and audience were both, in large part, its own sockpuppet accounts.
The stunt was part of the same broader IRA presence on Reddit later confirmed by leaked internal documents, which showed the agency pushing content from its front sites — BlackMattersUS among them — into subreddits and using 'American proxies' to operate accounts. Reddit subsequently identified and banned hundreds of IRA-linked accounts and documented the activity in its transparency reporting, while academic and security researchers (including a Georgetown Security Studies Review analysis of alleged IRA Reddit accounts) examined how the operation behaved on the platform.
For an archive of state influence operations, the self-AMA is a telling artifact: a foreign intelligence-linked propaganda apparatus using Reddit's signature format to manufacture the appearance of an authentic public dialogue, while in reality staging a conversation between its own fake identities — a literal performance of inauthentic 'grassroots' engagement.