NBC Publishes 200,000 Tweets Tied To Russian Trolls

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: NBC News is publishing its database of more than 200,000 tweets that Twitter has tied to "malicious activity" from Russia-linked accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. These accounts, working in concert as part of large networks, pushed hundreds of thousands of inflammatory tweets, from fictitious tales of Democrats practicing witchcraft to hardline posts from users masquerading as Black Lives Matter activists. Investigators have traced the accounts to a Kremlin-linked propaganda outfit founded in 2013 known as the Internet Research Association (IRA). The organization has been assessed by the U.S. Intelligence Community to be part of a Russian state-run effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential race. And they're not done. At the request of NBC News, three sources familiar with Twitter's data systems cross-referenced the partial list of names released by Congress to create a partial database of tweets that could be recovered. You can download the streamlined spreadsheet (29 mb) with just usernames, tweet and timestamps, view the full data for ten influential accounts via Google Sheets, download tweets.csv (50 mb) and users.csv with full underlying data, and/or explore a graph database in Neo4j, whose software powered the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations.

NBC News' partners at Neo4j have put together a "get started" guide to help you explore the database of Russian tweets. "To recreate a link to an individual tweet found in the spreadsheet, replace 'user_key' in https://twitter.com/user_key/status/tweet_id with the screenname from the 'user_key' field and 'tweet_id' with the number in the 'tweet_id' field," reports NBC News. "Following the links will lead to a suspended page on Twitter. But some copies of the tweets as they originally appeared, including images, can be found by entering the links on webcaches like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and archive.is."

Comments

You just put your lips together, and blow.

[drinkypoo]

Putin, that is.

Re: 200k tweets vs 6.5 billion dollars

[ScentCone]

How do we know AmiMoJo isn't a Russian?

To the contrary, we KNOW that AmiMoJo is a Russian. We know this because a law firm hired by a political consultant paid a foreign national to write down things that people he paid in Russia told him, and he put it in a dossier. And that dossier was confirmed by news articles that were written because the same guy who was paid to assemble the phony dossier briefed the reporters who then pretended they had other sources. So, obviously we know that AmiMoJo is a Russian, because we have enough evidence to convince a judge (as long as we don't mention who was paying for all of this) to grant the government the power to listen in on his communications, and the mainstream media will thus spend a year and a half repeating all of this non-stop as if it were fact. There, see how this works?