This week, the idea that Vladimir Putin is trying to get Donald Trump elected exploded very seriously into the mainstream. Photograph by Konstantin ZAVRAZHIN / Gamma-Rapho via Getty

For six months, starting in the fall of 2014, I investigated a shadowy online Russian propaganda operation called the Internet Research Agency. The agency has been widely reported in Russian media to be the brainchild of Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch and ally of Vladimir Putin. At the time, it employed hundreds of Russians in a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, where they produced blog posts, comments, infographics, and viral videos that pushed the Kremlin’s narrative on both the Russian and English Internet.

The agency is what is known in Russia as a “troll farm,” a nickname given to outfits that operate armies of sock-puppet social-media accounts, in order to create the illusion of a rabid grass-roots movement. Trolling has become a key tool in a comprehensive effort by Russian authorities to rein in a previously freewheeling Internet culture, after huge anti-Putin protests in 2011 were organized largely over social media. It is used by Kremlin apparatchiks at every level of government in Russia; wherever politics are discussed online, one can expect a flood of comments from paid trolls.

When I began researching the story, I assumed that paid trolls worked by relentlessly spreading their message and thus indoctrinating Russian Internet users. But, after speaking with Russian journalists and opposition members, I quickly learned that pro-government trolling operations were not very effective at pushing a specific pro-Kremlin message—say, that the murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was actually killed by his allies, in order to garner sympathy. The trolls were too obvious, too nasty, and too coördinated to maintain the illusion that these were everyday Russians. Everyone knew that the Web was crawling with trolls, and comment threads would often devolve into troll and counter-troll debates.

The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.

What Volkov said stuck with me as I continued to follow the trolls. Since the article appeared, last summer, the Internet Research Agency appears to have quieted down significantly. Many of the Twitter accounts stopped posting. But some continued, and toward the end of last year I noticed something interesting: many had begun to promote right-wing news outlets, portraying themselves as conservative voters who were, increasingly, fans of Donald Trump. Exposure to even small amounts of Russian politics can induce severe bouts of paranoia and conspiracy-minded thinking, and it seemed logical to me that this new pro-Trump bent might well be an attempt by the agency to undermine the U.S. by helping to elect a racist reality-show star as our Commander-in-Chief. At the time, I found it funny. The agency was a well-funded but often hapless operation—it created a cartoon character that was a giant buttocks to spread anti-Obama propaganda, for example—and this seemed like another of its far-fetched schemes to poison the Internet.

This week, the idea that Putin is trying to get Trump elected exploded very seriously into the mainstream, after WikiLeaks published thousands of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee, believed by intelligence agencies and security researchers to have been stolen by hackers connected to the Russian government. The hack comes after weeks of increased scrutiny of Trump’s connections with Putin—what the Washington _Post _called a “bromance.” The narrative draws mostly on three points of confluence: a public record of mutually admiring comments between the two (Putin on Trump: “Undoubtedly a very colorful, talented person”; Trump on Putin: “He's a strong leader”); Trump’s ambivalence toward U.S. participation in NATO, which Putin has long denounced as a tool of Western aggression; and Trump and his advisers’ financial connections to Russia and its allies, especially those of his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who previously consulted for Viktor Yanukovych, the former Russia-backed leader of Ukraine. Most commentators are careful to limit the implications of these connections, in a just-pointing-out-the-facts manner, but, given the sheer volume and often menacing tenor of the coverage of the Trump-Putin connection, the casual reader would be forgiven for coming away with the strong suspicion that the two meet every month for strategy sessions over caviar at Putin’s Black Sea dacha. “There’s something very strange and disturbing going on here, and it should not be ignored,” Paul Krugman warned, in the Times. The D.N.C. leak, perfectly timed to disrupt the Democratic National Convention, sowing discord between supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and generally making things more difficult for Clinton, appeared to put a bow on the Trump-Putin axis of evil. Today Trump seemed to fan the speculation. At a press conference, he referred to Hillary Clinton’s use of an unauthorized e-mail server and, speaking directly to the camera, said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing."

Yet, like most things having to do with Russia, the connection between Trump and Putin is far from straightforward. For every piece of damning evidence there is compelling counter-evidence. (The indispensable blog Russia Without BS has a good critical rundown of the most common claims.) Trump has said nice things about Russia, but he has also said that Americans should shoot down Russian planes if they get too close to U.S. ships. Trump’s supposedly deep financial ties to Russia seem, at the moment, a bit underwhelming for someone who has been trying to build in the country since 1987, and suggest a lack of Kremlin connections, as Julia Ioffe details in Foreign Policy. It is undoubtedly true that Putin would prefer Trump’s foreign-policy views to Clinton’s, but this is likely as much about a deep-seated loathing of Clinton, dating to her criticism of Russia’s fraud-ridden legislative elections in 2011, as it is about love for Trump. The hack itself may seem like a precision-guided act of information warfare, but given how easily it was pinned on Russia it very well may backfire, much like the Kremlin’s other meddlings abroad. Mark Galeotti, a professor of global affairs at New York University, argues that it will saddle Trump with the label of Putin stooge, perhaps even helping Clinton win the election.

I’m not too upset that Trump has been labelled an agent of the Kremlin. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. But the zeal with which many have seized on a foreign explanation for a domestic problem sets a worrying precedent for how any future event or movement that challenges our understanding may be processed, in a time when malevolent actors, foreign or domestic, can influence perceptions more easily than ever, and we can all see it unfold in real time. Russia’s use of propaganda, dirty tricks, leaks, and hacks in foreign affairs works a lot like a troll farm on a larger scale. The aim is to promote an atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia, heightening divisions among its adversaries. “Having realized it is unlikely to make any real or lasting friends, Moscow has instead turned its efforts into paralyzing and demoralizing its enemies,” Galeotti writes. This effort is ideologically blind: Russia supports extreme right-wing nationalist parties in France and Germany, while in the U.S. the state-run news outlet Russia Today is better known for highlighting the causes of the far left (Occupy Wall Street, the drone war, government surveillance). When I was investigating the Internet Research Agency, one of the trolls’ favorite topics to promote was the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting of Michael Brown. Today the agency has moved on to Trump. And yet one can see a future where political protests against police brutality or income inequality are discredited by opponents, because of superficial connections to Russia. This is especially easy to imagine under President Trump.