Twitter posts millions of manipulative tweets

Twitter Inc. has published data sets comprising millions of tweets, images and videos and thousands of accounts linked to operatives based in Russia and Iran, shedding light on how bad actors outside the US sought to manipulate social-media discourse in their home countries and abroad.

The social-media company has previously disclosed the activities, going back to 2016, but said in a blog post yesterday that it was opening up the data to the public to encourage independent analysis by researchers, academics and journalists.

The data sets just released are made up of 3841 accounts affiliated with the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), 770 other accounts potentially based in Iran as well as 10 million tweets and more than 2 million images, videos and other media.

Many of the accounts disclosed in the data sets have been previously reported. What’s

‘‘One of the big takeaways is just how big these operations were.’’

Ben Nimmo, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab

unprecedented is the size of the archive of information. ‘‘One of the big takeaways is just how big these operations were. The second point is that these operations started out for the benefit of the countries they were working in,’’ said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. ‘‘It really started out as a domestic tool for repression and then it was turned into an outward weapon targeting the U.S.’’

The Iran operation was largely pushing pro-Iranian government messaging abroad and directing users to certain websites.