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More than 10 million tweets sent by state actors Attempts to influence American politics have been made public, constituting one of the largest archives of political misinformation ever assembled.
The database reveals the astonishing extent of two disinformation campaigns, which have been divisive in the United States for over five years and have had repercussions on other national campaigns, notably the British referendum on the EU.
Twitter announced on Wednesday that it was putting tweets at the disposal of researchers and the public in order to support a broader analysis of how misinformation campaigns work.
The archives contain tweets sent between 2013 and 2018 by 3,800 accounts associated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Search Agency, which generated 9 million tweets; and 700 accounts associated with a smaller campaign of disinformation backed by Iran, which produced 1 million tweets. Including videos and images uploaded by political trolls, the database reaches a size of more than 350 GB.
Both campaigns were focused on the United States, but their "opportunistic" nature meant that others were on the firing line, according to the Washington, DC-based Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).
"Russian trolls have often chosen opportunity targets, especially elections and terrorist attacks, to try to interfere in local politics," said the laboratory after analyzing the database. "This included the promotion of anti-Islam hashtags after the terrorist attacks in Brussels, a hashtag in favor of the exit on the day of the Brexit referendum in Britain and leaks targeting French President Emmanuel Macron before his election.
"On June 23, 2016, as Britain held its Brexit referendum, troll farm accounts posted #ReasonsToLeaveEU 1,102 times, a mix of tweets and written retweets. They were apparently led by @WorldOfHashtags, who wrote: "Everyone is obsessed with #EUref today. So, let's play # ReasonsToLeaveEU. '
"This seems to have been an attempt, on the day of the vote, to create a trend towards hashtags favorable to leave. However, this should not be considered as a broader Russian attempt to intervene in Brexit. The Russian troll farm only posted 35 times on his #VoteLeave career and 4,437 times on his "Brexit", especially after the vote, suggesting there was no concerted campaign around the issue. "
The DFRLab stated that the archives highlighted the difficulty of finding and fighting such an operation in real time. "The most effective Russian trolls have used exactly the techniques that generate real activism and engagement online. This made it much more difficult to separate them from the authentic users. He will continue to do so. Identifying future foreign influence operations and reducing their impact will require awareness and resilience on the part of targeted militant communities, not just platforms and the open source community. "
Trolling is not limited to social media. As previous Guardian analysis showed, unknown authors have cited Russian trolls in more than 100 articles published in the UK. They cited their tweets as examples of humor, "on the ground" reports and public opinions.
An account, @KaniJJackson, was impersonated as an activist of Black Lives Matter and tweeted under the names "Kanisha J" and "Remove Trump Now," with a profile picture of Michelle Obama. This has been cited nine times by publications such as BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Another, @SouthLoneStar, claimed to be an American white supremacist and was cited by Metro, Telegraph and Sun for provocative tweets sent as a result of the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack.
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