Not long after Marat Mindiyarov started working at the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll factory indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on Friday, he began hearing about the coveted “Facebook Department.” There, workers could earn more money and work alongside a younger, hipper crowd. But to gain entry, job candidates had to prove they could seamlessly insinuate themselves into the American political conversation.
The English-language test, which Mindiyarov said he took in December 2014, included a question about vegetarianism and another about Hillary Clinton and the prospect that the Democratic front-runner would win the U.S. presidential election.
Mindiyarov, 43 and a teacher by training, wrote that Clinton had a good chance of winning, and that it would be a remarkable feat, making her the country’s first female president.
His bosses were not impressed.
“You didn’t pass the test,” the woman who administered the exam told him later that day, he said, although it wasn’t clear if his shortcoming was imperfect English or failing to bash Clinton. Either way, Mindiyarov remained stuck with the less-glamorous job of commenting on articles posted to Russian websites and quit three months later from a job he compared to something from “1984,” the dystopian novel by George Orwell.
By Anton Troianovski, Rosalind S. Helderman, Ellen Nakashima and Craig Timberg
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