What are their objectives?

Troll factories publish a large number of posts in any social network medium. These are usually published by fake users or by people who simply don't exist, and their main objective is to cause problems, influence the masses or even cause changes in the voters' choices and political views.

A clear example of its political impact is the St. Petersburg Troll Factory, which has had an specific focus on election influence operations. For instance, in 2014 some journalist from Nevskie Novosti presented themselves to some city residents and asked them questions about the actual political situation and about their thoughts. But what they didn’t know is that those “journalist” were analysts from one of several projects established by the Internet Research Agency (IRA); the St. Petersburg troll factory. Their objective was to collect information that could be used to ensure a win for the ruling party, United Russia, and to assess which candidates would likely need vote count “corrections” by way of election fraud. Furthermore, while this operation was ongoing, the troll factory was already openly hiring English-speaking specialists.