Thread by @thomasafine

It's interesting that the agency that Alferova and Klyushin used in their communications related to Trump and Miss Universe, "Innovation & Development Agency", used this name in English.

It's still on Klyushin's facebook page but was recently removed from Alferova's.

(Based on a google search which seems to think that text was on that page.)

While her page used "LLC", I haven't yet found any indication that such an LLC existed.

Meanwhile there is a linked in page for "Innovations and Development Agency" that may be the same. It is connected to innoros.ru and the "innoros" Twitter account.

Note that it's based in Voronezh, where Alferova is from (and I believe Klyushin too).

And note that it is described by LinkedIn and by the web page as a government organization.

The associated twitter account (apparently) began tweeting in December of 2016, although its join date is November 2010.

So according to Roman Beniaminov, they (Klyushin and Alferova) were from an outside firm that was hired to handle social media around the time of Miss Universe.

This is probably not too far from the truth. Alferova published a story about Miss Universe the day after the papers were signed in Las Vegas, and she had a bunch of insider photos too.

I suspect Roman B. is the one who took those photos.

Because in an exhibit of text messages from Ike Kaveladze he seemed upset about video that NBC found from the event and said something like "I don't remember filming that".

But make no mistake - Klyushin and Alferova both have many links to the Russian propaganda blogosphere of Russian trolls that some called "Rykov's army" or "Rykov's bloggers" or things like that.

For example, they're both acquainted with a well known nationalist blogger, Violetta Volkova, who (among other things) was responsible for significantly boosting the profile of Rykov's protege Maria Katasanova.

They're also acquainted with Anna Levchenko, a nationalist blogger and personality who describes herself as working for Putin to stop pedophiles. I've always wondered if she was connected to the campaign against ambassador @McFaul.

They both also seem to be linked to the collection of Russian trolls that I studied in this article, all of whom interacted with Trump in a coordinated fashion on Twitter immediately following Miss Universe.
medium.com/@thomasafine/a…

And note that in that study I left out two Russian accounts that interacted with Trump, but which did not appear to be automated, but rather were connected to verifiable human beings.

Klyushin and Alferova (and even Emin) are connected to at least one of those people.

Without going too far down that rabbit hole, that person also blogged about Miss Universe. She got married (to a guy also connected to Klyushin and Alferova) after Trump was elected, and they moved to New York right after Trump was inaugurated, and lived there for two years.

That guy by the way worked for a Russian company that invented the encryption algorithms used by the Russian government, and that built phone encryption apps, and that eventually ended up ended up on an export restrictions list for malicious cyber activities.

And there's clear signs that the Twitter accounts of that Russian couple were on a couple of occasions managed by a bot farm.

Anyway...

Artem Klyushin in particular seems to have very strong links to Rykov, tweeting at each other like old friends back and forth for years about anything and everything including bathtubs full of crayfish and how to cook them.

Klyushin was at Rykov's election night party, and was in the backroom with Rykov, which seemed to have been only Rykov's closest allies - just two or three other people.

It's interesting to me that Klyushin is explicitly called in the report "a Kremlin-linked bot developer". This is the first I've seen of any official acknowledgement of him playing such a specific role. It of course fits in with everything.

I had always assumed that Rykov himself ran a troll/bot factory, though it makes perfect sense if Klyushin was the guy who did the real leg work. Rykov is someone who is more about coordinating the message.

Then just when things are starting to get interesting in the report, we have a page and a half of redactions which seem to cover Klyushin's activities with Rykov in 2014 through 2016.

Their report says Rykov is called "chief troll". It's one of many propaganda-related monikers that has been thrown at Rykov.

He clearly gives propaganda assignments to a list of other nationalist bloggers. He also seems to be connected to social media manipulation factories.

The report notes that Rykov made a claim of a DM from Trump. They apparently dispute this claim based on DM records obtained by Twitter.

But Rykov's interest in Trump all the way back in the 2012 election (and earlier) can't be disputed.

And the content seems to very much favor Trump. One tweet seems to compare him to Chuck Norris. Another says that Trump says that our 2012 election result meant the loser wins.

There's a bunch of redactions here that would seem to be related to Rykov's international influence efforts. It then says that Rykov is connected to Timur Prokopenko.

Timur literally worked for Russia, apparently coordinating propaganda. He was a co-president of the nationalist Youth Guard.

There's a bunch of stuff about France and Rykov's failed campaign to elect Marin Le Pen that seems to be redacted.

Note that the Trump and Le Pen campaigns were linked, both given to Rykov.

He had this artwork commissioned.

It doesn't get into one of the most striking things I find about Rykov. Despite all the things we can speculate about that he may or may not have done, he ran a very big public campaign in Russia to promote Trump.

He was prepared to merchandise the above artwork.

He had a book commissioned too. (Rykov's early success was as book publisher, publishing a book that he claimed was a bestseller even before it had been released; he has a hand in all sorts of media).

It was called Black Swan, by Kirill Benedictov.

He had the help of a brand new TV network, Tsargrad TV, which sprang to life right as he needed it, and then went off the air right after Le Pen's failed campaign. It was built by Rykov associate Konstantin Malofeev who even hired a former Fox producer.
medium.com/@thomasafine/t…

And he of course had his army of nationalist bloggers, who would normally trash everything the United States did, out there writing article after article praising Trump.

He had his favorite provocateur, Maria Katasanova, out in the streets stumping for Trump, and wearing Crooked Hillary T-shirts, and ensuring that everything she did got plenty of TV coverage.

Maria Katasanova is a very attractive TV-friendly woman who was basically built by Rykov. She was introduced as potentially being someone that started the Bolotnaya Square riots, by a blogger under Rykov's influence.

She ran a failed run for Duma, promoted by Rykov, in the the tiny mirco-party Rodina.

All of this served to turn her into a personality that could be used to attract attention to any story, and he used her for that.

She was central to his Trump and Le Pen campaings.

None of this is at all in dispute. It was a big operation for promoting candidates that nobody in his _apparent_ audience (Russia) could vote for.

Just for fun, some more Trump artwork from Rykov (who started out as an art student by the way).

He uses a very controversial artist for much of his artwork, and that's all I'm going to say about that.

If you're curious, I suggest googling this rabbit hole away from other eyes.

One of the things mentioned is Rykov's creation of a website, trump2016.ru. What isn't mentioned is that this site was not for promting Trump directly. It was more like a control console for running a campaign.

Central to the site was software, likely commissioned by Rykov, called "mediafilter" which let him monitor news based on keywords in real time.

He registered it in August of 2015, and had it up and running basically the next day.

In addition to mediafilter it also seems to have had forums for online discussions, perhaps for coordinating his campaign among its members.

The point here seems to be that if you're pushing bloggers, and news stories about Trump (and using Klyushin and other troll farms to boost them in social media), then you're going to want to see the results of your efforts on media that you don't control directly.

The only other thing I would add about Rykov is that when he held his election night party, in which he invited lots of people from Tsargrad TV, including the guy from Fox, and Artem Klyushin, and the artist who painted the triptych, and lots of bloggers who worked for him...

...he also invited one of the owners of findface dot pro, Aleksandr Kabakaov, who also owns NtechLab, a firm that specializes in big data analysis using AI. Kabakov was billed as the guest of honor at that party.

As I've speculated in the past, Kabakov would be your guy if you had a massive dataset of election data to sift through.

https://twitter.com/thomasafine/status/1083062158194368512

I would also note that Kabakov is tightly connected to someone else that I recently did a thread about, Masha Drokova. She was also on the invitation list for the election night party, although I don't think she was in Russia at the time.

https://twitter.com/thomasafine/status/1290536305412190208