Massive Twitter data release sheds light on Russia's Trump strategy [View all]
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/
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