A Freelance Writer Learns He Was Working for the Russians

Mr. Wood said he approached the Peace Data editors in June after seeing a link on their website commissioning new writers. Other writers answered job ads, or were contacted through blogs where they were publishing their work. The site typically offered $75 to $200 for each article. Writers were paid through electronic systems, though Mr. Wood said he volunteered to write and was not paid.

The first article Mr. Wood wrote, which was focused on the top 1 percent of American wealth, was his pitch and idea. But when he submitted the story, he said, he was asked to cut significant portions, including one section tying Mr. Trump to the economic elite.

“It was just a paragraph or two, not serious, but I wondered why they wanted it cut,” said Mr. Wood. He would go on to write two more articles for the site, but lengthy email correspondence exchanged ahead of those articles led him to become increasingly suspicious of the editors and their intentions.

Many of the emails had obvious mistakes in grammar and strange syntax. In one exchange, after Mr. Wood took offense at what one editor had said, he was told that the editor was Romanian and didn’t have a good grasp of the English language.

Mr. Wood was troubled by the direction the editors were pushing. On Aug. 12, Mr. Wood suggested a story looking at the potential picks for vice president on the Democratic Party slate, or the “potential fall or dissolving of the Republican Party.”

He was waved away from writing about the Republican Party or Mr. Trump by a Peace Data editor who told him, “As for my opinion on the elections in America I don’t see both candidates as something that will benefit the country in the long run.”

“Elections in the US will always have a big impact on the whole world, so from my perspective I would prefer Bernie Sanders as the President,” the editor wrote.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/technology/peacedata-writer-russian-misinformation.html