---
title: The Alphabet Company that Hired a Russian Troll Farm
description: Why did Google's sister company hire a Russian troll farm? And what did Jigsaw discover when it paid for a Russian disinformation campaign?
---

[SecureWorld News ](https://www.secureworld.io/industry-news)

# [The Alphabet Company that Hired a Russian Troll Farm](https://www.secureworld.io/industry-news/alphabet-company-hires-russian-trolls)

 Written by [SecureWorld News Team](https://www.secureworld.io/industry-news/author/secureworld-news-team) | Thu | Jun 13, 2019 | 11:14 AM Z

Alphabet, which is Google's parent company, also owns Jigsaw, a tech incubator.

Jigsaw, as PC Magazine headlined in early 2019, is out to "[Detoxify the Internet.](https://www.pcmag.com/feature/365966/how-google-s-jigsaw-is-trying-to-detoxify-the-internet/1)"

This is one of many reasons Jigsaw has raised eyebrows after admitting it hired a Russian troll farm to run a disinformation campaign of fake ads and tweets in Russia.

The company it hired was SEOTweet, and as WIRED reports, the cost of the two-week troll campaign was a mere $250:

Two weeks later, SEOTweet reported back to Jigsaw that it had posted 730 Russian-language tweets attacking the anti-Stalin site from 25 different Twitter accounts, as well as 100 posts to forums and blog comment sections of seemingly random sites, from regional news sites to automotive and arts-and-crafts forums. Jigsaw says a significant number of the tweets and comments appeared to be original posts written by humans, rather than simple copy-paste bots. "These aren't large numbers, and that’s intentional," says Jigsaw's Gully. "We weren’t trying to create a worldwide disinformation campaign about this. We just wanted to see if threat actors could provide a proof of concept."

You'll want to read more about this one and the interview Jigsaw gave to the publication.

[View full post](https://www.secureworld.io/industry-news/alphabet-company-hires-russian-trolls)

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