Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today we're talking about the criminal conduct of internet trolls and the troll farms that breed them.

My guest is Yessica Aaro. Jessica is a Finnish journalist working for Finland's public service broadcaster.

A few years ago, she began to investigate internet trolls,

and her life has largely been upended as a result of her excellent work

that apparently hit a bit too close with some of these trolls.

Some of Yessica's story was described in an excellent New York

Times article that came out in October. Yeska, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so

much for having me. It's an honor. You've been targeted since 2014 and you've been living with

online abuse and threats to your physical safety.

One article described you as an unhinged bimbo driven by rasophobia.

Can you describe the really remarkable work that you've been doing to elicit this response?

Everything started already in September.

Over four years ago, when I wanted to specifically

investigate the influence of the programming social media propaganda trolls.

Because in 2014, I found out these really brave, excellent, independent Russian journalists

had found out that there is a troll factory based in St. Petersburg,

not so far from Helsinki, actually.

And there were even hundreds of people who were pretending to be opinionated citizens,

praising Putin, giving out opinions in favor of Putin's regime and policies. But in fact,

they were being paid to do that. So we only knew so little about the troll factory. And I want to really

look into the new phenomenon of Russian information warfare, the social media influence. And I wanted to really look into the new phenomenon of Russian information warfare,

the social media influence. And I wanted to know, does the troll factory have any kind of

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