How to Run a Troll Farm

In this episode, we talk about misinformation, disinformation, and troll farms in the 21st century with Olga Belogolova and Regina Morales.

Olga Belogolova is the Director of the Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She is also a professor at the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at SAIS, where she teaches a course on disinformation and influence in the digital age. At Facebook/Meta, she led policy for countering influence operations, leading execution and development of policies on coordinated inauthentic behaviour, state media capture, and hack-and-leaks within the Trust and Safety team. Prior to that, she led threat intelligence work on Russia and Eastern Europe at Facebook, identifying, tracking, and disrupting coordinated IO campaigns, and in particular, the Internet Research Agency investigations between 2017-2019. Olga previously worked as a journalist and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, National Journal, Inside Defense, and The Globe and Mail, among others. She is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project and serves on the review board for CYBERWARCON.

Regina Morales is the principal of Telescope Research, where she conducts investigations on behalf of law firms, multinational corporations, financial institutions, and not-for-profit organisations. She has subject matter expertise in Latin American politics, corruption issues, extremism, and disinformation. In particular Regina specialises in investigating disinformation campaigns waged on social media platforms, forums, and certain messaging apps. These campaigns include online harassment, corporate disinformation relating to securities, conspiracy theories, and politically or ideologically driven campaigns. She has seen, often in real time, how the theoretical components of disinformation and propaganda are used in practice. Prior to founding Telescope Research, Regina worked for two top-tier, Chambers and Partners-ranked global investigative firms where she conducted and managed complex, multi-jurisdictional investigations on behalf of white shoe law firms and multinational companies.

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