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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.
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
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).
Re 5 eye efforts
"GCHQ has tools to manipulate online information, leaked documents show" (15 Jul 2014)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
Welcome to CLEAN SWEEP and UNDERPASS.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
ISIS don't bother to disguise their posts with fake accounts. That's the issue here, not the content but the deception.
Also, PROTIP, when attempting what-about-ism don't put "what about" in the title of your post. Best to be at least a little bit subtle.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Twitter is whatever you want to hate. Conservatives think it's liberal, radicals think it's centrist, liberals think it's alt-right, etc. And they're all, to some degree, correct. It's mirror in which you see your enemy. This is the nature of a feedback loop that runs on instantaneous emotionality. If one believes there's an existential threat to one's people, ideology, way of life, whatever, they'll spend time on the platform reinforcing that narrative. There's a bogeyman right outside all of our houses.