Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
There are two key invitations going on.
1. Russian Meddling in the election
2. Trumps teams collision with the Russians
While proof in the #2 also means #1 was an issue. Having proof for the #1 doesn't necessary point to #2.
However I think #1 is a bigger problem. Because these constant trolling egged on by the Russian government has hurt us tremendously, it has created a situation of distrust of the other side, vs just disagreeing with them. For the bulk of left leaning and right leaning people, they are actually rather similar, they are all trying to make it in this world the best that they can, and they hope their contributions were overall positive.
However this trolling had successfully made groups seem like they are on a more devious path. It isn't about fighting for just rules ans safety, it has became their side fighting for majority power, or rethinking a policy becomes destroying all the people who benefit from it.
Now Trump is a bad president, as his statements seem to be focused on himself and not the nation, being too unpredictable to properly plan, unable to manage his own staff, and not able to unify a political party that has control of all parts of government. He has surrounded himself with Yes Men, who knows how to manipulate him, because they just need to tweak his ego, and he will go into that direction. However he is just a reflection of a polarized group of people, we have been bombarded with saying x group of people are good and y group of people are bad. As a Rich White man, being influenced by such media, he is going to assume the Poor minority group is causing all the problems, because you can plainly see their trolling is obviously false, while you ignore the tolling on your side.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Many of those tweets are about politics but without a clear purpose:
"How fucked up our country will be if Hillary wins in 2016 and Trump wins in 2020
Or vise versa"
What's the angle there? Sow the seeds of common sense?
lucm, indeed.
Noticed about 2012 how the Internet seems to change. Lots more ranty right-wing stuff, lots of unhinged SJW posts, outburst of trolling designed to annoy or piss off.
I like looking at conspiracy sites for fun. Similarly around 2012 there's a big change from the usual Ron Paul stuff & general government distrust to progressively more extreme right-wing material. Lots of posts trying to rehabilitate uncle Adolf, lots more racism, not much in the way of conspiracies - RedIce being an obvious example. At the same time many sites suddenly decided they love Putin (Godlikeproductions Putin obsession was particularly egregious) and thousands of memes spew out which contrasted wimpy Obama with manly bear-riding Putin.
Hmmm. Bit odd that. The Obama hate gets ever more demented. The racism gets worse. Posters with moderate opinions are pushed away.
The chan sites get ever more crazy and neo-nazi. Meanwhile in real-world politics all of a sudden lots of strange little separatist/right wing movements start getting lots of funding thrown at them. Weird shit like Brexit's main funder being married to a Russian and boasting about meeting the KGB is glossed over in the media.
Something is going on here.
Back to conspiracy sites... Donald eventually announces a run. The conspiracy sites which by now are politically to the right of Mussolini LOVE Donald. They create their own North Korean-style personality cult surrounding the orange one. Sites that a few years before were promoting UFOs or alternative remedies for sore asses go full out on the paranoia. JADE HELM!! MUSLIMS!!! SJW FEMINISTS FUCKING BLACK GUYS WHO DINDU NUFFIN ARE KILLING THE WHITE RACE!!!!
Then this stuff leaks out onto the wider Internet making discussions even worse than they were previously. Sites like IMDB's message boards become unreadable (and are eventually killed), extreme politics is the 'in' thing. Slashdot goes from nerd paradise to alt-right-troll-cave. Newspaper and movie sites comments look like something from 1930s Germany - assuming 1930s Germans couldn't spell and had mental health issues.
Where did this shit come from? Am guessing the far-right in the US and other countries decided to work together and with the help of some shady money men successfully managed to fuck up discussions on the Internet. Funding of extreme political movements helped fuck up political discussions in real life as well. Russia was clearly a part of that which can easily be seen in the amount of 'conservative' websites that seemingly worship the place. Contrast also with the number of said conservatives who believe Obama is a Muslim but think the idea of state-sponsored cyberwar from Russia is silly - i.e. most of the posts on here or Reddit today.
Add in characters whose agendas are somewhat confusing (Assange, Snowden) and we're currently in this clusterfuck of a mess where democracy is on its last legs and the world is being run by dickheads.
The only thing that amuses me about all this is that if we do end up going full fascist the first people to get put before a firing squad will be the unemployed autists whose contribution to Western society so far has been frog memes and a fascinating with MLP porn. Karma, you little shits.
However, being somewhat of a moderate and in the unlikely event of any FBI agents or non-hack journalists reading this, I'd going to give you a bit of advice. Devote some time to looking at the conspiracy sites and the alt-media political hangouts. Note how at the same time as traditional conspiracy interest was declining (911, Peak Oil, Roswell etc.) and the New Age craziness falling apart (no Mayan apocalypse) these sites started to rapidly expand. I don't believe for one second that Alex Jones is funding a multimillion dollar empire via Youtube money and the sale of shady vitamins to idiots. Check out this guy. Check out Henrik at Red Ice. Check out the cretin who runs Natural News. Find out who actually runs Godlike productions and similar.
You'll discover lots of interesting connections no doubt many involving our friends from Eastern Europe and their cut-outs in the US.
a) yes, it is easiest to whip up furor in and manipulate those that aren't neutral.
b) There are definitely troll and bot accounts on Slashdot.