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Twitter Publishes Archive of 10 Million Tweets From Russian, Iranian Bots (boingboing.net)

Posted by BeauHD on from the influence-campaigns dept.

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.

5 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. uhh, what about ISIS? Archive of that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Bad job twitter by NuclearCat · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Bad job twitter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's part of the basic trolling toolset, to establish yourself by linking to real news before you start on the disinformation. Effective trolls mix and match between reality and distortion, thereby infecting the reality with their distortion.

  3. Re:What about US & Five Eyes bots? by vux984 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Things like this always strike me as awfully nationalist and willfully ignorant propaganda terrorism. (So just like such bots.)"

    Yes. And?

    I mean, it is what you say it is. The US surely runs it's own too. And we're not going to get to see it unless or until someone leaks it. Which at some point will likely happen.

    And then perhaps you'll speculate it was a false flag to make us look bad? Which it might be.

    At some point you have to choose what you will believe, and determine what sources are likely to be as credible as is reasonable.

    So... where does that leave us?

  4. Re:What about US & Five Eyes bots? by AHuxley · · Score: 4, Informative

    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"