3 internet trolls convicted of defamation against journalist in Finland

MOSCOW - For more than three years, a Finnish journalist who investigated Russia’s army of vicious internet trolls faced a barrage of false accusations online that she was a U.S. intelligence operative, a drug dealer and an unhinged bimbo driven by Russophobia.

This week, the journalist, Jessika Aro, got a measure of satisfaction when a court in Helsinki convicted two of her most dedicated slanderers of defamation and handed them unusually harsh sentences.

Ilja Janitskin, a Finn of Russian descent who ran MV-Lehti, a vituperative website that rails against Russia’s critics, immigrants, Jews and the EU, was sentenced to 22 months in jail after being convicted on 16 criminal counts related to his website. His lawyer said he would appeal the judgment.

Johan Backman, a self-declared “human rights defender” who spends much of his time in Russia and has acquired a reputation as a strident defender of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, received a one-year suspended jail sentence for aggravated defamation and stalking. Scorning the judgment as “another dirty trick by NATO,” he said that he, too, would appeal.

A third defendant, a Finnish woman who worked on Janitskin’s incendiary website, was also given a suspended sentence.

Together, they were ordered to pay damages totaling around $155,000, plus legal costs.

The verdict, delivered Thursday by the Helsinki District Court, was the first time that a European country had taken action against pro-Russian disinformation spread through social media, websites and news outlets controlled by or linked to Russia.

Rossiya 24, a Kremlin-controlled television channel, featured the Helsinki case in its main evening news show Friday, depicting the judgment as an attack on Finnish “dissidents” and the conviction of Janitskin as a move to silence a website “opposed to the demonization of Russia.”

The Finnish authorities opened the case after Aro, a journalist with Finland’s national broadcaster, YLE, filed a complaint with the police in Helsinki in 2016 over what she said was a campaign of online persecution orchestrated by Backman.

Others also filed complaints, including a student activist who called for a boycott of companies that advertised on MV-?Lehti, Janitskin’s website, and was then mocked online, with her face photoshopped onto pornographic images. The court ruled that the website had displayed a noxious propensity for sexist abuse and racist slurs.

Backman denied playing any role in the most damaging attack on Aro - a false report in 2016 on MV-Lehti that she was a convicted drug dealer. But police investigators found that he had been directly involved in preparing the report. She had been fined while a student for possessing drugs but had never been convicted of dealing.

Backman, who served until 2014 as the representative in Northern Europe for the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a state-funded research group led by the former head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, denounced the trial as politically motivated farce orchestrated by NATO.