I worked for a Russian troll farm.

My job was to write fake provocative material targeted at specific groups or demographics. I worked from a location near my home in California. I wrote or published colleagues’ writings on Medium, Blogger, Buzzfeed and Facebook, and my Twitter handle pushed links to these and other sources. The team I worked on was dedicated to targeting progressives, with a view to planting seeds of hatred and nurturing increased mistrust of fellow democrats whose ideas are ‘less left’. We were breaking down the democrat population, creating infighting, destroying trust.

The overall organization, while secretive and obfuscated, appeared to be run from the highest levels of Russian government, and got its orders from an official close to Putin. I never spoke with her, nor do I know if she is real. It appeared to me that the organization had no clear political bias, as it had teams building deep connections into right wing religious groups, gun advocate groups, and on the left was active in targeting young people, teachers, tech employees, students and avid readers of Move On, TruthOut, etc. I received feedback on my articles and very clear instructions about topics, titles, timing and images to be used. In certain cases, my content underwent editorial screening before publishing, while at other times I just published, occasionally being scolded for an error or missing a key phrase or reference. I had a lot of fun under my pseudonym, building lengthy dialogues and real online relationships with people who passionately agreed with my writings. Another part of my job was coaching Russian colleagues and giving feedback where their turn of phrase may betray their English as a second language status. They were all smart, educated, and nice people.

I wrote about white privilege. I ranted about white people walking around completely unaware of the platform they stand on, built for them to evade the brutality of America’s racist core. White people gushed and told me they were “all in” to try to dismantle this privilege and help the oppressed get revenge. It was so exciting to bullshit them as a ghost friend.

I also wrote about the tyranny of the wealthy, describing in detail my horrible encounters with tech billionaires, Hollywood stars and New York hedge fund owners with vast wealth. It was all 100% fake. Nevertheless, my comments section and Facebook followers got themselves into a lather about how they hated the rich and wanted to blow up the systems that allowed America’s wealthy to steal everything and lock themselves into the castle. My stories were detailed, journalistic and often didn’t scream opinion, but were designed to make you feel outrage and disgust, and to get you to comment, outing yourself for the farm to collect your identity and profile for future use.

Facebook finally caught me and shut me down in 2019, without ever connecting my fake identity to the real me (as far as I know). I could have started up again under a new name and flown under the radar for another year before being shut down again. In the end, I found a more lucrative and more fun game to play, so I quit. I have never been interrogated by a US intelligence agency. Naturally, I never used my own computers or my own network to access my other identity.

This I can tell you with absolute certainty: America is devouring itself with hate, and it’s all being expertly managed by Russia. No, you don’t hate Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg; you learned to hate them in part by reading my colleague Natalie via her online persona. You don’t despise Joe Biden. You were indoctrinated, hypnotized into believing he is a sexual harasser and a sellout and a closet conservative, a puppet of the big money machine. It seems the mission of the Russian operation is to create suspicion and mistrust between groups that would otherwise get along. Schoolteachers vs union electricians. White democrats vs black democrats. Latino immigrants vs African Americans. Well off tech executives vs Amazon Whole Foods workers.

I know very little about how the Russian machine operates, how many people like myself were paid to write trigger content, nor whether Russia is the only foreign state meddling with Americans’ core beliefs. But I can tell you that it is real, and that the plan is working. You’re taking the bait, and we are falling into hate-fueled despair, we no longer trust each other. We’re allowing the fabric that held us together to be shredded by an invisible foreign enemy. There does not appear to be any serious, effective measures being taken to stop the rot.

I am truly sorry for helping create this mess.