How many tweets can state-sponsored internet trolls publish? Millions, according to Twitter.
On Wednesday, the company released a full archive of over 10 million tweets it suspects came from Russian and Iranian trolls, in a bid to help academics investigate online information warfare.
"Independent analysis of this activity by researchers is a key step toward promoting shared understanding of these threats," Twitter said in a blog post.
The archive is largely made up of tweets from 3,841 accounts affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, a notorious "troll farm" based in Russia that the US believes tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.
According to federal investigators, the troll farm created fake Twitter accounts pretending to be US-based groups or activists, and then published tweets meant to secretly spread propaganda and misinformation to the American public.
In January, Twitter notified 1.4 million people in the US who had encountered tweets from the suspected Russian troll accounts. But today is the first time the company has made all the tweets from the Russian troll accounts available to the public. Another 770 accounts in the archive have been sourced to actors in Iran, who used the same tactics to spread misinformation.
The full archive is over 360GB in size and covers the troll activity Twitter has detected from the Russian and Iranian groups since 2016. The files not only contains text to the tweets, but also images, GIFs, and videos the internet trolls used.
The Atlantic Council, a US think tank, received early access to the archive and published a blog post about its findings. It said over 9 million tweets in the archive came from the Russian troll accounts.
"The Russian trolls were non-partisan: they tried to inflame everybody, regardless of race, creed, politics, or sexual orientation. On many occasions, they pushed both sides of divisive issues," the Atlantic Council wrote. "Content spread from the troll farm accounts was designed to capitalise on, and corrupt, genuine political activism."