Twitter opens substantial archive of tweets connected to Russia, Iran false information

Twitter is sharing a huge chest of information on foreign disturbance in political discussions.

The social media network on Wednesday opened an archive of product connected to accounts related to capacity details operations by Russia and Iran The objective: letting independent scientists, and the public, see what it’s been up versus.

The information sets present details on 3,841 Twitter accounts connected with Russia’s INDIVIDUAL RETIREMENT ACCOUNT, or Internet Research Agency, and on 770 accounts perhaps coming from Iran, according to thecompany’s blog post Included are more than 10 million tweets and more than 2 million images, GIFs, videos and Periscope broadcasts going back to2009

All this comes a little bit more than a month after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey affirmed prior to Congress about foreign disturbance in United States elections. He was signed up with by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, with both discussing the spread of false information on social networks and about foreign impact operations– and what their business are doing to eliminate back versus web giants, provocateurs and propagandists.

The executives acknowledged that they ‘d been sluggish to react to an increasing tide of issues. Dorsey stated the “required changes won’t be fast or easy.”

Now, with the information exposed Wednesday, they’re attempting to offset wasted time.

“We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter, while partnering with civil society, government, our industry peers, and researchers to improve our collective understanding of coordinated attempts to interfere in the public conversation,” composed Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s lead on legal, policy, trust and security matters, and Yoel Roth, head of website stability, in the article.

The bulk of the tweets originated from Russia’s trolling operation, with 9 million tweets from the individual retirement account, while the rest originated from Iran’s propaganda project. Ben Nimmo, a defense and worldwide security expert with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, got early access to the enormous information dump.

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He’s been following Russia’s trolling campaign for years, but getting to see every single tweet showed that the misinformation effort was much larger than he originally expected. 

“The first thing to notice is the sheer size of the Russian operation,” he said. “It really gives you an impression of the sheer scale of it.” 

Nimmo noted that the tweets were targeting every political issue that Russians could use to divide the US: They would pose as Black Lives Matter activists, gun rights advocates and even former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, among others. 

While the campaign reaches as far back as nine years ago, the majority of the content comes from late 2014 and early 2015, Nimmo said. That’s when Russia was building its trolling operation to suppress voices surrounding its occupation in Ukraine, he noted. 

But once it became a refined tool to spread propaganda domestically, the IRA was able to turn social media into a weapon abroad, setting its sights on the 2016 presidential election in the US. Two days after Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president, it had launched the #HillaryNoThnx hashtag on Twitter. 

Combing through the tweets, Nimmo was able to see what made the Russian trolling operation so successful. Part of it was that trolls jumped on hot-button issues immediately, and another part was that they understood what worked on social media. 

“The more radical it becomes, the more rewarding it gets,” Nimmo said. “The trolls embedded themselves into the DNA of Twitter and social media.”

After Twitter suspended thousands of accounts from the IRA in September 2017, the trolls quietly returned with another 1,000 accounts. But the activity post-ban shows that they were much quieter the second time around. 

Nimmo noted that Twitter’s gotten better at detecting propaganda accounts, and also changed its rules so the Russian trolls couldn’t spread as easily as they did in 2015. 

“If you think about pre-2017, this was virgin territory. They were operating in such a permissive environment they could get away with anything,” the researcher said. “We’ve moved from first-generation trolling in an unprotected space to an increasingly protected space.” 

You can click here to download Twitter’s data sets.

First published Oct. 17 at 7:46 a.m. PT. 
Update at 8:40 a.m. PT: Adds more details on data published by Twitter.

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