So my name is Adrian Chen. I'm a writer based in Los Angeles.

And in 2015, I wrote one of the earliest articles about the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.

I first learned about the Internet Research Agency in 2014 when Buzzfeed posted a bunch of internal documents that hackers had leaked from the agency.

One of the documents said that it was starting to target the United States with this disinformation campaign.

Most of my initial effort was spent going through these documents, running them through Google Translate, creating this big web of Russian trolls and following them.

And eventually I ended up going to Russia because I wanted to see sort of on the ground what it looked like and how it compared to this sort of virtual, you know, Potemkin village that they were trying to create of fake Americans.

And it was definitely one of the strangest reporting experiences of my career.

And I got sort of caught up in the operation myself. So yeah, a year later, the Internet Research Agency became a major issue during the presidential campaign.

And then after that, it was swept up in the Mueller.

Sorry. Am I pronounced I always for now is this a smaller? Yeah, it's more right? Yeah, I think I'm because for a lot like when it was first starting, I was always saying Mueller and then I realized it was Mueller.

So now I'm always like doubting myself. But according to the Mueller report, a Russian group called the Internet Research Agency,

coordinating the massive disinformation campaign designed to sow social discord trying to divide all of us against each other and done a pretty good job of it.

They're still at it, by the way. It was swept up in the Mueller probe. And, you know, I think it's important to revisit the story now that we're entering another election to sort of get beyond this boogie man that the Internet Research Agency and Russian trolls have become to sort of look at what it's actually like on the ground.

You know, I think it was a really human and imperfect operation and not sort of this sprawling machine that we might sometimes think of it as. So here's my essay. The agency read by you in Chung.

Around 8.30 a.m. on September 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message.

Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1.30 p.m. the message read, take shelter, check local media and Columbia chemical dot com.

St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur's job.

But he hadn't heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn't even heard of Columbia chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Colombian chemical plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he'd heard nothing from them that morning either.

Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried. Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?

If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried.

Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road.

A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centralville, Louisiana, hashtag Colombian chemicals, a man named John Merritt tweeted.

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