Twitter on Wednesday released a massive trove of data associated with foreign influence and misinformation campaigns spanning nearly a decade — just three weeks before the U.S. midterm elections.
The social media company said in a blog post Wednesday morning that the data comes from 3,841 accounts affiliated with the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency and 770 other accounts potentially originating in Iran.
The data release includes the content of tweets from these accounts, which provides a richer look at how these accounts operated.
“They include more than 10 million Tweets and more than 2 million images, GIFs, videos, and Periscope broadcasts, including the earliest on-Twitter activity from accounts connected with these campaigns, dating back to 2009,” the company said in the post.
“In line with our strong principles of transparency and with the goal of improving understanding of foreign influence and misinformation campaigns, we are releasing the full, comprehensive archives of the Tweets and media that are connected with these two previously disclosed and potentially state-backed operations on our service,” the company said.
The company said the release followed up on its commitment to Congress earlier this year to give regular updates and information related to its investigation into foreign influence campaigns on the platform.
Twitter added that the goal of the release was to make the data available for researchers and academics for investigation.
As a result of its investigation into Russian interference around the 2016 presidential election, Twitter said back in January that it had notified around 1.4 million people that they had directly engaged with Russia-linked accounts during the election or had actively followed those accounts at the time they were suspended.
Twitter added it was “clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease” and that the company was “committed to understanding how bad-faith actors use our services.”
The announcement comes as U.S. tech companies have ramped up efforts to identify and stop attempts from foreign agents seeking to influence elections ahead of the Nov. 6 midterms.
In August, Facebook and Twitter said they had found hundreds of accounts, pages and groups based in Iran that they said covertly spread political content to people on four continents including in the U.S.
Twitter has also purged millions of fake accounts from its service in recent months.
