US stops funding anti-Putin troll factory
Earlier, a scandal broke out that the bot farm was working, in particular, in the interests of the FBC, founded by Alexei Navalny
The Legion of Elves bot farm, created by the US-based Free Russia Foundation (FRF) for anti-war and anti-Kremlin campaigning on social media, is being shut down, investigative journalist Andrei Zakharov said on his Telegram channel, citing FRF top manager Yegor Kurotyepov.
Source: moscowtimes.eu.
According to Zakharov, Kurotepov told him that the Legion of Elves had run out of funding and the project would be curtailed:
"A small part of the project will continue to work, but the main efforts of the Free Russia Foundation Stratcom, which I run, have already been redirected to the formats of analytics, associations of regional bloggers (Coalition Against Propaganda)."
Kurotepov stressed that the decision to close the project was not influenced by the scandal surrounding it, when SVTV wrote about it, citing an archive of working documents received from one of its former employees.
The publication claimed that the opposition bot farm, with offices in Lithuania and Georgia, worked in the interests of the Anti-Corruption Foundation founded by Alexei Navalny. Members of Navalny's team, Ivan Zhdanov and Leonid Volkov, denied this.
The Free Russia Foundation was established in Washington in 2014. One of its founders is Natalia Arnaud, a graduate of the Buryat State University's philology department, who had previously worked for 10 years at the International Republican Institute (IRI), which was officially funded by the US government. The foundation is funded by donations, but does not disclose its donors. Its budget is $2 million a year.
Background. As reported earlier, the American Free Russia Foundation has created an army of bots to "tell Russians the truth about the war in Ukraine".
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