Facebook data:
As part of the Committee’s open hearing with social media companies in November 2017, the Minority used a number of advertisements as exhibits, and made others available as part of a small representative sampling. During the hearing, Committee Members noted the breadth of activity by the IRA on Facebook:
3,393 advertisements purchased (a total 3,519 advertisements total were released after more were identified by the company);
More than 11.4 million American users exposed to those advertisements;
470 IRA-created Facebook pages;
80,000 pieces of organic content created by those pages; and
Exposure of organic content to more than 126 million Americans.
The Facebook advertisements we are publishing today have been carefully reviewed by the Committee Minority and redacted by Facebook to protect personally-identifiable information (PII). To protect innocent victims, Facebook—at the urging of the Committee Minority—also has notified users whose genuine online events were unwittingly promoted by the IRA.
The data made available today does not include the 80,000 pieces of organic content shared on Facebook by the IRA. We expect to make this content public in the future.
Advertisements from 2015, 2016 and 2017 can be found here.
Twitter data:
During the Committee’s November 2017 open hearing, the Minority introduced into the record 2,752 Twitter accounts that Twitter identified as connected to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Kremlin-linked “troll farm.” These accounts were designed to impersonate U.S. news entities, political parties, and groups focused on social and political issues. During the hearing, the Minority also revealed a selection of Twitter advertisements paid for by Russian news outlet RT, which the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment labeled as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.”
According to data provided to the Committee by Twitter, a snapshot of relevant Twitter activity in the period between September 1 and November 15, 2016 reveals:
More than 36,000 Russian-linked bot accounts tweeted about the U.S. election
Approximately 288 million impressions of Russian bot tweets; and
More than 130,00 tweets by accounts linked to the IRA.
The Minority is making public an additional 1,103 accounts that were identified by Twitter subsequent to the November 1, 2017 hearing as connected to the IRA. Twitter has also informed that it removed 14 handles from the original list provided to Congress last fall, yielding an updated total of 3,841 Twitter accounts affiliated with the IRA. Twitter now believes those 14 accounts should not be included based on improved methodology, improved understanding of IRA characteristics, and other new information – including the possibility that some are authentic user accounts that had become compromised.
The Minority is also releasing all advertisements run by RT on Twitter during the election timeframe.
Finally, the Minority is also making available a sampling of voter suppression tweets provided by Twitter that sought to mislead voters about the election by posting incorrect dates and information related to voting. There is no indication that this particular activity had links to the Russian influence campaign, but we believe it is vitally important for the public to understand and view nefarious online activity meant to weaken our democratic process.
Updated comprehensive list of Internet Research Agency-linked accounts identified by Twitter can be found here.
Paid advertisements run by RT in the election timeframe can be found here (@RT_com), here (@RT_America), and here (@ActualidadRT).
Sampling of voter suppression content discovered by Twitter and provided to the Committee before the November 1, 2017 hearing can be found here.
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