We're less than three weeks away from the 2018 midterm elections, and Twitter, finally, is releasing the millions of tweets it has identified as originating with the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency in an effort to "enable independent academic research and investigation."
Twitter said on Wednesday that it had identified 3,841 accounts affiliated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll farm” that has been indicted by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller for attempts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
It found another 770 Twitter accounts that it traced back to Iran.
"We are making this data available with the goal of encouraging open research and investigation of these behaviors from researchers and academics around the world," Twitter said in a statement on its "elections integrity" site.
In total, the exposed accounts shared more than 10 million tweets and 2 million images and videos, Twitter said, before being taken down.
Twitter had already made public the existence of tweets it believes to be the product of foreign misinformation campaigns, but the release of the tweets themselves on Wednesday will allow researchers to learn much more about Russia and Iran’s disinformation efforts on Twitter since 2016.
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"The Russian operation was much more skilled. It masqueraded as real Americans to turn real Americans against Hillary Clinton, and against each other,” [Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab] added, referring to Donald Trump's presidential election challenger.
"Literally from the day Clinton announced her candidacy they were attacking her," ... Nimmo ... told POLITICO. "But on the Republican side, in the early days, they seemed to be backing more than one horse."
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... But Nimmo said the messaging around Trump turned decidedly in his favor around the time the reality show star began locking up the Republican nomination.
That period of time is said to be of interest to investigators with special counsel Robert Mueller's team, which is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — including a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
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Nimmo said the research into the data is still in its early stages, but he said it's clear that much of the U.S.-focused tweeting was aimed at simply fomenting discord around political and social issues, a dynamic similar to what's already been identified in Facebook ads and highlighted in Mueller's indictment of Russian nationals and entities over 2016 election interference.
"There was a lot of stuff that was just plain divisive, that were just attempts to inflame," Nimmo said. "They had Black Lives Matter accounts and Blue Lives Matter accounts. There was a lot of sticking fingers in painful wounds."
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The Twitter database is not limited to U.S. influence operations. Many of the Kremlin-linked tweets are in Russian and appeared aimed at shaping politics in Russia and Ukraine, according to Nimmo.
While aspects of social media foreign-influence operations have been disclosed in bits and pieces, he said, "the massive value of this Twitter dump is now it looks like we've got the lot."
Data archive (Twitter)
Enabling further research of information operations on Twitter (Twitter)
Twitter Publishes Tweet Trove From Russia, Iran Campaigns (Reuters)
Massive Twitter data release sheds light on Russia’s Trump strategy (Politico)