How Russian Trolls Are Using American Businesses as Their Weapons
They’re targeting companies — and yours could be next
By Tom Foster
Koch’s Turkey Farms sits on 300 acres in a hilly part of Pennsylvania at the southern edge of the Pocono Mountains. For four generations, since 1939, the Koch family has been raising turkeys there. In the 1990s, the company became known as an industry pioneer for its humane practices and the clean diet that its turkeys eat. It sells around a million turkeys each year, 30 percent of them in the run-up to Thanksgiving. Like that of all farms, Koch’s Turkey’s business rises and falls largely according to forces outside of its control: the price of grain, trade conflicts, diseases that threaten its flock. But in 2015, something entirely different happened.
On Thanksgiving Day that year, a New Yorker named Alice Norton posted on an online cooking forum that her family had been severely poisoned after eating a turkey they’d purchased from Walmart. “My son Robert got in the hospital and he’s still there!” she wrote, as chronicled by The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t know what to do!” Throughout the holiday, thousands of tweets and posts on Twitter and other social networks shared similar accounts. Eventually, a news site called Proud to Be Black published an article that claimed 200…
