Twitter has released a MASSIVE collection of tweets that show how foreign trolls abused the service
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Loading... - Ivana Lucija
- 19 Oct 2021
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Twitter has released an archive of 10 million tweets that illustrate how Russia and Iran used Twitter to whip people up around issues like Brexit and the US presidential election.
The company says it's releasing this information to "improve public understanding of alleged foreign influence campaigns"
In total the archive contains 360GB of tweets and media, some of which Twitter showcased on its site dedicated to this release.
Some sensitive data was "hashed" (scrambled by a complex algorithm) so it can't be seen by most people, although Twitter says that it will provide a full set of data to specialists prepared to agree to its privacy rules.
There are, in total, 4611 accounts that have been identified as foreign influences. Twitter says that these could be state-backed institutions.
According to the company 3,841 accounts appear to be the work of the Russian Internet Research Agency, and an additional 770 accounts from Iran.
On the day of the EU referendum , June 23 2016, 1,102 messages were tweeted with the hashtag #ReasonsToLeaveEU.
Brexit was mentioned in 3,789 tweets, according to the BBC's analysis . However the government has denied that there was any evidence the campaign on Twitter had influenced the outcome of the referendum.
In America accounts had spent considerable time and effort attempting to discredit Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Atlantic Council said this was a two-year-long attack on her before the election.
Russians weren't immune from the fake accounts either. Some 57,000 tweets were sent trying to apportion blame for the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17. There were also considerable tweets aimed at Russian politicians too.
To increase the reach of these tweets the people behind them used If This, Then That (IFTTT) to automate the process of tweeting and retweeting from a variety of accounts.
If nothing else this information is proof that foreign powers attempted to have an influence on other countries. While it doesn't necessarily show any successes in this regard it shows that social media could be open to abuse in this way.
