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

200k tweets vs 6.5 billion dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say the Russians got a better bang for their buck.

Re:200k tweets vs 6.5 billion dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the scary thing about it, and it doesn't just concern Russia or governments in general. One or two years ago a guy showed how easy it was to get an arbitrary (and obvious) fake story on the top page of reddit with a ridiculously small budget. (200 bucks or so) While this might be a dream for viral marketing agencies, used by the wrong people such ways of influencing a large number of people can wreak quite some havoc. (Not that I think that the traditional ways of propaganda and advertisement/branding are more beneficial.)

 

Re: 200k tweets vs 6.5 billion dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Please... The obvious point is that it didn't influence shit.

If $1.2 billion in Clinton propaganda, 94% favorable domestic media coverage, an army of celebrity shills, a brainwashed electorate hooked on the welfare plantation, and every dirty trick in the book (plus new ones like buying FISA warrants) can't win you a presidency, then Russians tweeting about BLM literally did nothing.

This is obviously the Democrats and NeverTrumps desperately searching for an excuse so they don't have to admit that they lost to the worst candidate in history.

Re: 200k tweets vs 6.5 billion dollars

[Mr D from 63]

Please... The obvious point is that it didn't influence shit.

Very true. For comparison, there were 3.5 Millions Tweets generated in a couple hours during the 2012 VP debate between Biden and Ryan, a debate that didn't mean squat.

Re: 200k tweets vs 6.5 billion dollars

[AmiMoJo]

The relevant metric is how much influence these tweets had. How much they were retweeted, how much they shaped the discourse.

Just comparing the language in the tweets to some of the posts on Slashdot suggests that some people were heavily influenced. Usually the ones who insist that the Russians had no effect on anything.

You see the same behaviour with cult members.

Re: 200k tweets vs 6.5 billion dollars

[alvinrod]

I think you make the mistake of thinking that the people who read those tweets or follow this accounts were anywhere close to neutral to start with. I do not think you could find many people who had their minds changed.

Also, why do you assume posts made here are genuine and not also troll accounts, whether Russian or just asshats from wherever? If they would use Twitter, why not other popular sites as well?

Re: 200k tweets vs 6.5 billion dollars

[Mr D from 63]

The relevant metric is how much influence these tweets had.

Application of common sense tells us very little if any. Do you actually believe someone changed their vote because they read one of these tweets among the tons of other tweets out there?

I think we need to address Russian meddling, but its not like its made any difference to this point.

Re: 200k tweets vs 6.5 billion dollars

[PopeRatzo]

If the media is 60:40 in favour of one side, it looks like one side is ahead. If it's 70:30 it looks like one side is more ahead. If it's 94:06 it starts to look dubious.

So, if 94% of the media says today is Saturday, do you throw away your calendars?

You're buying into the "there is no such thing as truth" mindhack, which is how Donald Trump got elected in the first place. Once you can get people to believe nothing is true, then you can get them to do anything. It is the ultimate "Listen and Believe".

Re: 200k tweets vs 6.5 billion dollars

[jader3rd]

I think you make the mistake of thinking that the people who read those tweets or follow this accounts were anywhere close to neutral to start with. I do not think you could find many people who had their minds changed.

True, but it might have riled them up enough to remember to vote; when without the false placed anger, they might have not voted.

Re:I take this as a badge of honor

[ThomasBHardy]

The fact that our elections are free and open enough AND THEY KNOW they can influence them through social media meddling,.

Fixed that for ya

Re:How does a long term member unsubscribe?

[ThomasBHardy]

That's the trap now isn't it.

Facts start to come out after the investigation has had time, and now it's "I'm tired of this".

Shame to let facts start intruding onto our personal bubbles, isn't it?

The reality is that we're on the verge of a new cold war based on information and social media. This isn't about one election, it's about how states are choosing to behave with meddling. And I'm not suggesting we're not guilty of doing some of the same things. But it's all escalating and it'll get worse before it gets better.

Re:How does a long term member unsubscribe?

[AbRASiON]

Even if it's true. Why do we need a bloody Russia post every 12 hours on this site? So people can have political fights? Seriously.

We're not all Americans here. So we're not all crazy about politics, day in, day out.

Re:Reminder to all there are multible invistagatio

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say there are potentially 3 investigations:

1. Russian meddling in the election
2. Trump's team's collusion with the Russians
3. Trump's personal involvement in collusion with the Russians.

Like you say, these are quite different questions and a "yes" on one does not necessarily imply the others are true (depending on which we're talking about). #1 is pretty much settled. It occurred, and the data that NBC published is more evidence. #2 is suspicious, because you've got people like Paul Manafort who led the campaign and have been indicted for highly questionable financial activities with Russian interests. Then there's the meeting in Trump Tower with Trump's son and others. #3 is not clear at all. Trump keeps professing his innocence, and I could even believe it because it is entirely possible his campaign did collude (wittingly or unwittingly), yet still have Trump entirely oblivious. Goodness knows he's oblivious on all sorts of other things.

The thing that bothers me in all this is that Trump is utterly fixated on his own innocence. If he is innocent and was doing his job, he should be accepting #1 like everyone in the intelligence community is telling him, and *doing* something about it to protect the next election. He should be applying the sanctions that the Congress and Senate passed almost unanimously and he fricking signed into law. Instead he keeps chanting "no collusion! no collusion!" as if that is *all* that matters. No, you incompetent fool. Even if there was no collusion (which is not yet demonstrated), you need to get off your butt and lead the changes necessary to discourage attempts at it in future, because clearly the Russians *tried*.

The guy is straight up self-interested and/or incompetent even if you grant that he's innocent. Thankfully the intelligence agencies and justice department will slowly and thoroughly labor through the investigation anyway as long as they are allowed to do their job, but the guy needs to stop trying to interfere with it.

What about Canada?

[William Baric]

I'm not American, I live in Canada, and I certainly admit posting a lot of comments on social networks during the last US election. Worse, a lot of prominent Canadian figures made comment after comment on social networks about both Trump and Clinton. I'm sure Canadians posted more than 200,000 tweets. So why not accuse Canada of interfering with the US elections?