Twitter fingers the Russians and Iranians

Twitter has released a data store of posts from 3,841 accounts that have been identified as being connected to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Russian "troll factory" that used Twitter and Facebook to conduct an "influence campaign" aimed at causing political turmoil during the 2016 US presidential election as well as undermining the political process in other countries, including Britain, Germany and Ukraine.

The company has also released another set of data connected to 770 accounts believed to be connected to an Iranian influence campaign.

The files released by Twitter come to more than 360 gigabytes of information including more than 10 million tweets and associated metadata and over 2 million images, animated GIFs, videos, and Periscope streams. They provides a picture of how state-sponsored agencies have used the Twitter platform in an attempt to influence Western politics, elections and referenda since 2009.
More details here.


"Trump calls me American" - says Putin.

(The tweet above was one of those in the archive released yesterday - an apparently pro-American message promoted by Moscow! It came from the Russian troll-factory during the US presidential election.)
The Atlantic Council, a US think tank, was given early access to the data trove and has published insights of its own on the news site Medium.

"One main purpose was to interfere in the US presidential election and prevent Hillary Clinton's victory but it was also aimed at dividing polarised online communities in the US, unifying support for Russia's international interests and breaking down trust in US institutions," wrote the authors.

They added that of the two state-backed campaigns, the Russian effort appeared to be more focused on inflaming already polarised communities and would tweet on both sides of an issue.

Personally I doubt that these Russian and Iranian campaigns have yet succeeded in actually changing the result of any Western elections or referenda, but the Russian state probably has succeeded in their primary aim of sowing division and making people doubt the legitimacy of the results.

The West needs to up our game, get faster at identifying social media sabotage, and make sure that hostile foreign powers are not able to unduly influence our future elections.

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