FiveThirtyEight has published a dataset of 3 million tweets from accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian “troll farm” that conducts online influence operations. The dataset, assembled by two professors at Clemson University, is the largest to date about Russian trolls’ actions, containing tweets from 2,848 accounts collected between February 2012 and May 2018. The dataset consists of timestamped tweets and their contents, information about the author’s follower count and accounts followed, and whether a tweet was original or a retweet. Analysis of these tweets shows a large spike in activity on October 6, 2016, right before WikiLeaks published emails stolen from the Clinton campaign, and another spike in summer 2017, when the Internet Research Agency accounts began imitating stereotypical Trump supporters.
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