THE Russian trolls are back — and once again trying to poison the political atmosphere in the United States ahead of this year’s elections. But this time they are better disguised and more targeted, harder to identify and track. And they have found an unlikely home, far from Russia itself, says a CNN investigative report.
In 2016, much of the trolling aimed at the US election operated from an office block in St. Petersburg, Russia. A months-long CNN investigation has discovered that, in this election cycle, at least part of the campaign has been outsourced – to trolls in the West African nations of Ghana and Nigeria.
They have focused almost exclusively on racial issues in the US, promoting black empowerment and often displaying anger towards white Americans. The goal, according to experts who follow Russian disinformation campaigns, is to inflame divisions among Americans and provoke social unrest.
The language and images used in the posts – on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – are sometimes graphic.
One of the Ghanaian trolls – @africamustwake – linked to a story from a left-wing conspiracy website and commented on Facebook: ‘America’s descent into a fascist police state continues.’
Referring to a Republican state senator, the post continued: ‘Someone needs to take that Senator out.’
On another occasion, @africamustwake tweeted: “YOU POLICE BEEN KILLING BLACKS SINCE YA RAGGEDY MOMMAS GAVE BIRTH TO U. HAPPY MLK DAY TO U HYPOCRITES.”
More than 200 accounts were created by the Ghanaian trolls — the vast majority in the second half of 2019 — and they reached hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people worldwide.
Inside the troll farm
The operation’s headquarters were in a walled compound in a quiet residential district near the Ghanaian capital, Accra. It had been rented by a small nonprofit group that called itself Eliminating Barriers for the Liberation of Africa (EBLA).
Sixteen Ghanaians, mostly in their 20s, worked at the compound; some lived rent-free in a nearby apartment. They were issued mobile phones, not laptops, and worked around a table. The EBLA trolls communicated as a group through the encrypted Telegram app, which is rarely used in Ghana.
One of the trolls agreed to talk to CNN, so long as her identity was disguised. She said she had no idea she would be working as a Russian troll. She said that employees were given topics to post about. “So you get stories about LGBT, you get stories about police brutality, depends on what you are working,” she said.
The employee said they were told that the best time to tweet and post was late afternoon and at night in Ghana, times when a US audience would have been active. They were given US articles to read.
CNN has found EBLA workers created fake social media accounts in bursts, since the group registered in June 2019. Activity stopped suddenly in February 2020 after a raid by the Ghanaian security agencies, and Twitter later suspended accounts on its platform.
Facebook and Twitter had already been looking into some of the troll accounts when CNN notified the two companies of our investigation. In a statement Thursday, Facebook said that its ‘subsequent assessment benefited from our collaboration with a team of journalists at CNN’ and it had ‘removed 49 Facebook accounts, 69 Pages and 85 Instagram accounts for engaging in foreign interference.’
Facebook said: ‘This network was in early stages of audience building and was operated by local nationals – witting and unwitting – in Ghana and Nigeria on behalf of individuals in Russia. It targeted primarily the United States.’
Facebook says that about 13,200 Facebook accounts followed one or more of the Ghana accounts and around 263,200 people followed one or more of Instagram accounts, about 65 percent of whom were in the US.
Twitter told CNN that it had removed 71 accounts that had 68,000 followers. ‘Most were tweeting in English and presented themselves as based in the United States,’ it said in a statement. ‘The accounts – operating out of Ghana and Nigeria and which we can reliably associate with Russia – attempted to sow discord by engaging in conversations about social issues, like race and civil rights.’
The activity uncovered by CNN had striking similarities to the Russian troll campaign of 2016, which created hundreds of accounts designed to pass as American. @africamustwake, for example, which described itself as a ‘Platform For #BLM #Racism #PoliceBrutality,’ claimed to be in Florida.
Other accounts, for example, claimed to be in Brooklyn or New Orleans.
Facebook said that although the people behind the campaign had attempted to conceal their purpose and coordination, its investigation had found links to both EBLA and “individuals associated with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency.”
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) was responsible for much of the foreign trolling activity aimed at the 2016 and 2018 US election campaigns, according to the US government. The IRA was funded by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is so close to the Kremlin that he is nicknamed “Putin’s chef.”
According to CNN, the man running EBLA calls himself Mr. Amara and claims to be South African. In reality he is a Ghanaian who lives in Russia and his name is Seth Wiredu. Several of EBLA’s workers said they had heard Wiredu speak Russian.
Late last year, Wiredu extended EBLA’s activities to Nigeria, filling at least eight positions, including a project manager to help with ‘social media management.’ CNN uncovered the postings for two of the jobs, and a source in Nigeria confirmed that the employees shared office space in Lagos. The Nigerian accounts posted predominantly on US issues too.
And at the end of January this year, EBLA ventured even further afield. It advertised a position in Charleston, South Carolina, just as the IRA had done in 2016. The LinkedIn posting invited applicants to ‘join hands with our brothers and sisters world-wide, especially in the United States where POC are mostly subjected to all forms of Brutality.’
The posting on LinkedIn stopped accepting applications days later.
On February 6, Ghanaian security services raided the EBLA compound. On that same day the group stopped posting on the social media accounts it had created. One of the workers told CNN they were told to lie on the ground and had guns pointed at them. They were interrogated by police and the phones used to post on the fake accounts were confiscated.
When CNN visited the compound two weeks later, it appeared to have been abandoned.
In a statement to CNN, the Ghanaian security services said their Cyber Security Unit had become suspicious of EBLA’s activities and believed it was engaged in ‘organised radicalism with links to a foreign body.’ They added that they had determined that ‘EBLA receives its funding from an anonymous source in a European country.’
Ghanaian security sources subsequently told CNN that all of EBLA’s funding had come from Russia.
Wiredu does not seem to have been deterred by the raid. Early in March, he called a meeting of EBLA workers. CNN observed the meeting from close by.
Wiredu told the workers, whom he met in several groups, that the trouble with the security services would soon pass, according to someone at the meeting. He told them they would be returning to work and should create new accounts, providing him with the passwords.
Approached by CNN after the meeting, Wiredu denied he had ever worked for the Internet Research Agency or knew Prigozhin.
‘I wouldn’t say I have Russian partners. I have friends … but to call them partners wouldn’t be right because I don’t ask someone to come and support me,’ he said. He said he did translation work for many entities in Russia.
Wiredu insisted he funded EBLA from his own income and did not understand why the Ghanaian security forces had raided the compound. He said the accounts had been ‘talking about what is important to black people, talking about racism, talking about police brutality.’
‘I actually, I perceive myself as a blacksfighter. I fight for black people,’ Wiredu added.
Wiredu acknowledged that he had called himself Amara and pretended to be South African.
