Russia has remained a recurring topic in the depressing lead-up to this month's presidential election since at least July, when New Yorker writer Adrian Chen noticed "a lot" of Russian trolls had seemingly started flipping their accounts into pro-Trump propaganda machines. As Samantha Bee noted on this week's Full Frontal, the possibility of Russian interference also reared its head surrounding the series of WikiLeaks email dumps aimed at the Democratic Party. To get a closer look at what the hell is going on here, Bee took the Full Frontal team to Russia to talk to actual Russian trolls.
"If this election has done one good thing for the country, which it hasn't, that would be to ensure that nobody will ever want to use email again," Bee said at the top of Monday's episode. "While Russia was hacking computers to influence our election, our brains had already been hacked by dank-ass memes that drown out facts with baseless conspiracy theories. Unlike the people who share them, I was actually curious where the memes come from. My search took me all the way to Russia, home of the troll industrial complex."
Bee then sat down for a chat with two alleged "paid trolls," both of whom chose to hide their identities for obvious reasons. "The reason I'm hired is to make simple people change their mind about their vote and also about Russia," one troll told Bee. Frequent targets for these trolls, at least according to trolls, include the comments sections of Washington Post articles and social media platforms like Twitter.
So the next time someone's brainless aunt comments on your like-less Facebook post with a preposterously false anti-Hillary meme, just reply with a link to this video.
