Last week, FiveThirtyEight
published nearly 3 million tweets sent by handles affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll factory.” That group was a defendant in one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments, which accused the IRA of interfering with American electoral and political processes.
We shared the data with the public in concert with the researchers who first assembled it: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, both of Clemson University. Their hope, and ours, was that other researchers, as well as our broader readership, would explore the tweet data, share their findings and improve the data set, all with a goal of understanding Russian interference in American politics.
“So far it’s only had two brains looking at it,” Linvill said of the data last week. “More brains might find God-knows-what.”
Many more brains have now looked at it, and our readers — as ever — have not disappointed. Some of them found ways to improve the data set. We’ve already incorporated a number of those suggestions, and we brought several of them to the attention of the researchers. And some readers made a lot of cool stuff.