Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Publishes Archive of 10 Million Tweets From Russian, Iranian Bots (boingboing.net)
AmiMoJo shares a report from Boing Boing: To enable "further research of information operations on Twitter," the company today published a dataset of tweets posted by known Russian and Iranian troll farms. "These large datasets comprise 3,841 accounts affiliated with the IRA, originating in Russia, and 770 other accounts, potentially originating in Iran," the blog post reads. "They include more than 10 million Tweets and more than 2 million images, GIFs, videos, and Periscope broadcasts, including the earliest on-Twitter activity from accounts connected with these campaigns, dating back to 2009." You can download the Russian and Iranian datasets here. The Russian dataset is comprised of 1.24GB of tweets and 300GB of media, while the Iranian dataset is comprised of 168MB of tweets and 65.7GB of media.
Where is the dataset of US troll farms?
They aren't archiving all the ISIS posts? ISIS had 100s of accounts all spamming terrorist propaganda 24/7 basically Obama's whole second term. Can we get an archive of THAT? Started around 2013 when John Brennan became CIA director, and ended around 2017 when Trump took over and replaced Brennan with Pompeo.
That means they hacked Twitter to get the nuclear agreement passed! Or maybe they are now hacking to get it stopped or reinstated!
I never know what to think unless CNN tells me!
You know, given that their budget is more than an order of magnitude bigger.
Also, who verifies that they are actually bots? Or what their intent is? Or if that intend is good or bad for me?
Or that they ever existed? Or that they weren't created by the opposite "side" under a false flag.
Things like this always strike me as awfully nationalist and willfully ignorant propaganda terrorism. (So just like such bots.)
No matter which "side" publishes whatever about which other "side". I'd be saying the same, if it was Pravda (or whatever) publishing US propaganda only.
As native russian speaker, just in first lines directly i see posts have nothing to do with "farms". For example, f9dded769bb2275fc6531c1b4d10cf05272c48806fbd73265ef318fac0a22962 is just reposting _in russian language_ russian (Kirov) city news. Most likely just some kind of automated bot, reposting newsfeeds from aggregator.
Can't see anything how it makes it "troll farm". And news even, seems, not biased, they reposted news from various websites pro and against government.
I feel i will be considered criminal, by default, just because i'm posting sometimes in russian language
...about fake news.
Chinese bots would be too costly. In China it is probably less expensive to hire many people to pretend to be bots rather than have actual bots.
I thought Iran was the USA's best friend (read: puppet) in the region again, now that Russia is back in their "convenient enemy to take out and fearmonger with, whenever things don't go well at home" closet. Just like the last time, in the 60s, when they were the "stronghold against communism". Especially with Turkey falling our of favor.
That is the path to schizophrenia/religion/superstition or however you want to call it.
Just like the word "opinion".
There are only two things:
That which you experience. (In the sense of what scientists call "observation".)
And that which you predict with a certain likeliness, given the patterns of commonality in those experiences.
Feelings also are a form of prediction, by the way. But their problem is, that the parts of the brain that those are coming from, can't tell fantasy from reality. But they are the basis of all thinking, according to neuro-scientists. So if the logical thinking that they lead to, cannot keep them in line with outside experiences, you get "belief". And when the generated emotions are strong, you they are called triggers.
Hence, I chose to only base my inner model of reality on that which I experience, and, while trusting the predictions that, in my experience, are useful, be aware that they are only assumptions too. I also accept that I am merely the way in which the experiences I received are put together, and therefore, my reality can only ever be the result of my what my brain's bias makes out of my experiences.
Anything else, including your comment (and my comments, from your POV), TFS, TFA, and the entire described reality in the media, are not real.
Reality is what happens, when I go outside. (Unless I look at a billboard or hear something being said.)
It's called "false flag" and "poisoning the well". And it's a technique mentioned in the NSA leaks. It's extremely old though, and definitely used by every single spying and propaganda agency, big political organization, big lobby group and big corporation.
E.g. you take a valid criticism, and start posting it, posing as your enemy's side. But you join it with some utter bullshit, that is easy to attack, ridicule, and not take serious.
Spam this enough, and whoever posts the valid criticism, will be ridiculed, even if he did not mention or even know the bullshit. They are now associated. The criticism is poisoned.
On top of it, the bullshit, if nicely nuanced, can even be picked up by the "dumb mass" part of the group, and spread by them themselves. Or even just by people who didn't notice the flaws with it, before repeating it. So now the ridicule even becomes actually valid! At this point, the valid criticism is completely drowned.
Sorry, I know having a nice and simple scapegoat gives the day structure, but you're not gonna get any useful or reliable bit of view out of this whatsoever. None of us were there. It's just wind blowing against wind, in a silly game that swarm heads play, to grow the biggest body of swarm drones (<- that would be us).
Does this mean Twitter is retweeting these trolls?
So now any private tweet can be republished by the company, even if that tweet was for a private group?
It is a complete liberal progressive, algorithmic , echo chamber that should be TLD to 127.0.0.1 It is harmful to the internet.
I did a project similar to this for a Political Science class back in the 70's. Using whatever database it was to show that the more orthodox one's faith (not just Jews) the more likely they would vote Republican.
Ignoring the elephant in the room?
was so good at this that Twitter didn't include them in this dataset.
Twitter doesn't have the computing power to give their NPCs the ability to identify bots.
But really, the mass bannings of late of artisanal trolls while Jack "You wouldn't believe how wide I gaped my asshole!" Dorsey screams, "MUH BOTS" should tell you all you need to know here.
It's not like we could even remotely tell.
They are just a troll farm, just like the Russian and Iranian ones mentioned here. The only difference is they are funded by idiots in this country instead of the governments of others.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
We're not playing your definitions idiot. That's the problem: you're boxed in by what marx said and he's a 19th century drunken clown. You fools have no imagination. It's why you're losing.
Hitler was also elected, doesn't mean that he wasn't racist.
it's basically anyone from Russia who shares an opinion on the internet. Remember that when you gasp at the numbers, and understand that Russia and Iran, or whoever they are accusing, has got _nothing_ on America when it comes to propaganda machinery.
are from american bots?
Publish that !
So, Russia and Iran did it!
Slashdot, please stop repeating stuff as fact. How about you understand and use words like 'Alleged','It's Twitter Conspiracy Theory that,' or 'Pot and Kettle', or 'Trust Twitter, they wouldn't lie'...........
This rubbish deserves no place on Slashdot.
I blame the US accent for introducing horrible spelling mistakes such as "terrabytes" or "meggabytes"
So Clinton/DNC paying Steel in the UK to collect propaganda from Russia to influence the 2016 election is called treason.
Good to know you think Hillary and the DNC are traitors.
Sexist comment if I ever heard one. You sound just like, well, Trump.
Whataboutism.
Shut up Ivan we know you pretend to be SJWs too.
Did BASIC interpreters need newlines in the USSR?
They get mod points... well I know how they get mod points. All real slashdotters know how the moderation system works. You might also know except when slashdot was popular you were too busy using toilet paper and dildos for currency and committing genocide in chechnya.
People may call you trolls but most Slashdotters started trolling when accessing the internet without a permit was still a high crime in your country. You stick out like a bent nail here and it makes it easy to spot you guys on the rest of the internet.
Your boss should fire you for the exposure you're giving to your operation right now.
Ignoring the elephant in the room?
Of course asking for any proof that these armies even exist is pointless. This is not an elephant, it is a Squirrel!
Wow, ten million spanning almost a decade, against the backdrop of the hundreds of millions of Twitter posts per day. Trump's own account has 55 million followers, by comparison.
Oh and glad to see Iran lumped in there too; we definitely need to be singling them out more, because reasons.
Well there's this analysis that graphed the data over time. There's no bell curve in the number of tweets during that time period leading up to the election. How curious.
It's as if the excuse for heavy-handed political censorship is all that matters, not what actually happened.
Release the Russian bot posts?