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

[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

[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?

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.

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?