Bloomington, Indiana (CNN) When it comes to hobbies, Josh Russell concedes he gets a little obsessive. No matter his interest, be it videogames or miniature figurine board games, he always wants to be the best. Perhaps that explains the dedication he's shown to his latest pastime: Hunting Russian trolls.

By day, the 39-year-old father of two works as a systems analyst and programmer at Indiana University. Once the kids are tucked in, he spends hours scouring social media to unmask the operatives behind the disinformation campaigns roiling Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms.

Russell is part of a growing network of online sleuths using public information to conduct open source investigations into Russian accounts posing as Americans. Officially, their work is called open-source intelligence, or OSINT, and it often identifies trolls before the platforms do. Russell's work in particular has helped journalists at CNN, NBC News, The Daily Beast, and other outlets cut through the lies and disinformation.

"My main motivation is to kind of help people understand what happened," Russell says. "Just documenting what happened and that what different bots may have been up to on Twitter, so people can see and look at the data for themselves and maybe think, 'I've been consuming this disinformation and maybe I should stop."

Russell's interest in troll hunting started in the waning weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, when he started investigating some of the most slanderous lies circulating online about Hillary Clinton. He'd been leaning toward voting for Donald Trump, but realized he could not find any evidence supporting some of the most outlandish allegations against Clinton circulating on Twitter.

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