Twitter releases election-interfering tweets from Russia and Iran

Twitter has brought the foreign election-interfering trolls out from under their bridges.

On Wednesday, Twitter announced in a blog post that it was releasing the complete cache of data and content by foreign entities including Russia and Iran  created to interfere with American politics and information. The amount of content is staggering: 4,611 accounts from foreign bad actors published over 10 million tweets to manipulate American discourse since 2009.

Twitter is publishing the data in compliance with promises it made to the US government, and to enable independent research of the information campaigns. 

“It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease,” Twitter wrote. “We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter, while partnering with civil society, government, our industry peers, and researchers to improve our collective understanding of coordinated attempts to interfere in the public conversation.”

The majority of the accounts and content comes from Russia’s Internet Research Agency. But about one sixth comes from state-backed efforts by Iran, a campaign to which Twitter and Facebook alerted the public in August. 

The examples of the content it published look familiar: memes supporting Trump and debasing Hillary Clinton, alongside Tweets expressing outrage against police violence in black communities. It’s another reminder of how foreign actors weaponized both general hate and vitriol, as well as legitimate issues affecting the American public.

Anyone can download the data here. But you might want to have an external hard drive around; the Tweets from the IRA comprise 296 GB, while the Iran media is 65.7 GB. The archives contain “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.”

Twitter gave a group of researchers early access to the data. But it hopes that making the information more widely available will help in understanding and combatting these efforts. 

In May, Congress published a similar data dump of promoted Facebook ads created by Russians to sow discord. It was about the same size, in GB, as the Tweets; but that was just the promoted content on Facebook. Twitter’s cache includes non-promoted content.

The data is part of Twitter’s larger “Elections integrity” campaign. With just a few weeks to go until the American midterms, we hope it’s working.