Massive Twitter data release sheds light on Russia's Trump strategy
Source: MSN
Twitter on Wednesday released a trove of 10 million tweets it says represents the full scope of foreign influence operations on the platform dating back nearly a decade — including Russia's consistent efforts to disparage Hillary Clinton and an initially erratic approach to Donald Trump that eventually settled on a concerted pro-Trump message during the 2016 campaign.
The huge data cache consists of tweets from some 3,400 accounts tied to the Kremlin troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency and 770 others linked to Iran. It also includes some two million gifs, videos and other visual content. Twitter said it's making the information available to "enable independent academic research and investigation," according to a company blog post.
The Russian tweets around the 2016 presidential election showed distinct patterns when it came to Clinton and Trump, according to researchers at the non-partisan Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which has been scouring the data since late last week.
While the Clinton animus was clear from the start, it took the IRA a while to settle on its Trump strategy, as the Republican primary played out. "Literally from the day Clinton announced her candidacy they were attacking her," Ben Nimmo, an information defense fellow at the lab, told POLITICO. "But on the Republican side, in the early days, they seemed to be backing more than one horse."
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/massive-twitter-data-release-sheds-light-on-russia’s-trump-strategy/
= new reply since forum marked as read
"My American M.O.B. over your GOP-Russian Mob any day, any time...let's roll!"
There's something about what you've quoted in your reply to "Massive Twitter data release sheds light on Trump Russia strategy" that made the ole "spidey sense" perk up. I read the entire actual Atlantic Council report on this matter but found no data, no surveys, no polling whatsoever to support the two sentences above the "Conclusions" statement you've quoted from medium.com that attempts to "pooh-pooh" the influence of the Russian bot campaigns and troll farms.
You need to understand that "Medium" is Twitter's online magazine and it is very important for them to absolve themselves from as much blame as possible for what happened in the 2016 elections. They are, after all, being called on the carpet in congressional investigations. The most important thing for Twitter right now is to prevent Congress from regulating them.
At first, Twitter denied everything regarding Russian disinformation accounts operating on their platform. Now that the evidence is out proving the lie in that assertion, the only option they have left is to say, "Yeah, okay, there were these things going on, but they didn't influence a thing."
Think about it for a second. Do you find Twitter to be a credible authority as to what did and did not influence the political motivations and mindsets of Americans in 2016?
The only thing that could determine exactly how much influence occurred would be a mass polling of Americans to answer this: Of the themes put out by the troll farms, which did they believe to be true and how much did it influence the political opinions they ultimately developed?
Just anecdotally, I personally know three people who now readily admit to having been taken in by social media posts that have been found to be part of the Russian bot campaigns. Two of those persons ended up not voting at all in 2016. The third voted for Trump, and, in her words, now regrets "being such a fool for believing what I was reading online back then." No one has called to ask any of these three persons whether they were affected. In fact, NO single American has been asked this question because ZERO polling on this topic has occurred.
So, the next time you read such statements regarding what social media did or didn't influence in 2016, kick your own "spidey sense" into high gear.
