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453 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2019
By the time of my forced departure, I had endured a two-and-a half-year campaign of death threats and libelous news articles. Online hate sites had brainwashed even some of my friends, turning them into enemies. These same sites portrayed me as a criminal, a liar, and mentally ill. Anonymous users suggested various methods of killing myself. One stranger proposed that I hang myself, while another recommended a 'Russian suicide': someone would push me under the metro, but in a manner staged as self-inflicted. A third individual wished that someone would put a “bullet in the whore’s head, Russian style.” Each time I opened my laptop, or glanced at my phone, I was forced to read snuff fantasies about me produced on an assembly-line scale. I was afraid that the psychological violence would at any minute spill out of the internet into the physical world...I had become the target of such vitriol for one reason only: I was a journalist investigating Russian social media information warfare.
Financier Bill Browder (in the chapter "The Businessman") who has turned his effort to seek justice for his murdered Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky into a worldwide campaign to sanction Russian criminal profiteers.
Open-source researcher Eliot Higgins (in the chapter "The Investigator") and his organization & website Bellingcat, who first exposed the Russian military's downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014.
Journalist Liz Wahl (in the chapter "The Insider") who naively first joined the news organization RT (Russia Today) thinking that it was a legitimate news broadcaster, only to discover its pro-Russian bias and who subsequently made a public on-air resignation which went viral in 2014.