The Russia connectionTwitter’s massive data release shows the Kremlin’s broad pro-Trump strategy

Published 17 October 2018

Twitter today (Wednesday) released ten million tweets it says represent all of the foreign influence operations on the social media platform, including Russia’s consistent efforts to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and support Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. The Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg-based Kremlin’s troll farm, created 3,400 accounts to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign and support Trump. Before helping Trump defeat Clinton, the Kremlin helped Trump secure the GOP nomination by targeting former governor Jeb Bush and Senator Ted Cruz.

Twitter today (Wednesday) released ten million tweets it says represent all of the foreign influence operations on the social media platform, including Russia’s consistent efforts to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and support Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Politico reports that the data cache consists of tweets from some 3,400 accounts tied to the Kremlin troll farm Internet Research Agency (IRA), but also 770 other account linked to Iran. The database also includes some two million GIFs, videos, and other pieces of 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 Ben Nimmo, a researchers at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which has been analyzing the data since late last week.

Russia’s Clinton animus was clear from the start, but it took the IRA awhile to settle on its Trump strategy, as the Republican primary played out.

“Literally from the day Clinton announced her candidacy they were attacking her,” Nimmo told Politico. “But on the Republican side, in the early days, they seemed to be backing more than one horse.”

He described “peaks and troughs — a lot of pro-Trump content and a lot of anti-Trump content” in 2015 and 2016, adding that Trump’s GOP rival Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) got a similar mixed treatment while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was the target of negative content.

But Nimmo said the messaging around Trump turned decidedly in his favor around the time the reality show star began locking up the Republican nomination.

That period of time is said to be of interest to investigators with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — including a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

By Election Day, the Russian trolls’ tweets were nearly uniformly pro-Trump, expressing sentiments like, “I don’t want a criminal in office! I’d vote for Monica before I vote for Killary! #Trump #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #TrumpForPresident,” according to the Atlantic Council lab’s findings published Wednesday.