Finland's largest Russian-language discussion forum, Russian.fi, has often been at the mercy of hateful pro-Russian commenters or trolls, says the site's webmaster Veronika Solovian. She visited Yle's Päivän kasvo or Face of the Day program on Friday.
Thousands of Russian-speakers living in Finland visit the site each day, and they discuss contemporary issues and events such as Finnish-Russian relations.
Solovian says that she stumbles across trolling often in her work as webmaster.
"When the most recent crisis in Ukraine started a whole lot of new users became members of the site," she says. "They focused on writing solely on political issues from a narrow perspective – and they can be called trolls because of their offensive and aggressive rhetoric."
Downed plane raised heat
Solovian says that one of the hot topics on Russian.fi was the MH17 passenger flight that was shot down over East Ukraine a year ago. The first reactions were those of shock.
"After that all kinds of war experts entered the conversation and started to express their own theories," Solovian says. "They weren't even trying to find the truth, instead asserting their own truths one after the other."
Solovian says that theories about the destroyed airplane abounded, including one on a planned attack by Kiev and another that claimed the United States was behind the tragedy in an attempt to drive a rift between Ukrainians and Russians.
Still more bizzarrely another assertion was that no crash had even occurred. The mud-slinging became so heated that the webmaster had to shut the conversation down several times and delete multiple comments.
"The topic itself is painful, and the moderators had a hard time physically as well as mentally," Solovian says. "It was one of the reasons behind our decision to close our forum's political side completely. The atmosphere on the site has been much better since we did that."
