3M Russian troll tweets | Hacker News Reader

3M Russian troll tweets

github.com

69 pointsPretzelFisch16 comments

Someone should make a website that lets you put in your twitter handle and checks if you've publicly interacted with any of these accounts.

_Twitter_ should inform users.

Edit: It appears they have informed some users: https://twitter.com/jmorse_/status/954556158047543296

Edit2: Here's a chart of all timestamps by hour+minute: https://imgur.com/a/xiNuagy

Edit3: Here's a list of all accounts tab separated with number of tweets: https://pastebin.com/raw/Em4NeHN8

How do I get the actual data? IRAHandle_tweets.csv doesn't seem to have any data in it

Click the download button or clone the repo.

You probably won't be able to view it on github.com because the file is 700+ MB.

Looks like they're actively changing the repo and removed the file I tried to access earlier.

  curl https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/fivethirtyeight/russian-troll-tweets/master/IRAhandle_tweets.csv > tweets.csv

There is something that pops out to me as interesting in this dataset; that the tweets don't consistently push one singular message.

Is this to spread divisiveness? For example, all the 10_GOP tweets are, of course, very pro-trump:

> cute 10 yo girl had a Trump dress on. Hannity asked her why she liked him. She said because he's doing great things for the country!

Whereas 4MYSQUAD, seems mostly Black Lives Matter related tweets, some are strongly against Trump/the right:

> Do conservatives give a fuck about #policebrutality?

USFreedomArmy is far-right:

> No wonder liberals cannot think logically. The U.S. FREEDOM ARMY awaits your enlistment

And user AAnitRacist is left again:

> Megyn Kelly tears into Trump over attacks on Trump U judge's ethnicity

----

EDIT: I see now the csv has RightTroll & LeftTroll as column values, which is nifty. The accompanying article states:

> Left Trolls often adopt the personae of Black Lives Matter activists, typically expressing support for Bernie Sanders and derision for Hillary Clinton, along with “clearly trying to divide the Democratic Party and lower voter turnout.”

Yes. This is discussed in the accompanying article https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-were-sharing-3-mill...

I think it is pretty widely accepted that if the US or other capable foreign power were to put their mind to it and act on a united front, severe damage could be done to Russia's ability to constantly be a force for irritation in world politics.

Naturally, then, the best way to prevent that from happening is simply to sow discord. Get the people angry at each other. Hence, you see Russia playing all sides.

> severe damage could be done to Russia's ability to constantly be a force for irritation in world politics.

How? We can't actually invade Russia. There also doesn't seem to be much interest from anyone in heavily sanctioning Russia.

Russian sanctions were passed by a split congress in a time that is widely regarded to be pretty much a deadlocked congress. The only roadblock to these sanctions was when Trump refused to implement them (though I guess the majority republican congress could do something else maybe? I don't know who's wheel house "enforcing" a sanction is).

Which is super convenient for the Russians, because previous sanctions have in fact seemed to hurt them, and the Magnitsky Act also seemed to have an effect

Russia isn’t partisan, they support whatever agenda makes America the weakest at any given time.

So, it's a little difficult to come up with solid numbers on it, but most estimates I've seen are that there are approximately 300-500 million tweets per day. All of this activity amounts to about eight and half minutes of daily tweet volume, spread over two years.

People get very zoned in on very small and rare occurrences. I see this all the time in software support; a customer will report some bug, and claim that it is happening constantly; you dig a little more, and they continue to insist that it is happening all the time; when you get to the bedrock facts in logs and traces, you find that it happened twice out of tens of thousands of interactions over the last few months.

I think the goal of these efforts is to provide material that gets picked up and spread by others, amplifying their message. They help to normalize an environment of divisiveness and extremism.

As intelligence services have always done, are doing now, and will do until the end of time. I do find this whole "The Russkies are Coming!" narrative bizarre; everything that's been totaled up so far keeps amounting to a pisshole in the snow compared to domestic election spending or outragism peddled by home-grown media.

The difference is perception and tangibility. We can see and count these tweets...and to some degree quantify their effect (e.g. Retweets). And this is a much greater bang for the buck with no feet on the ground.

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