Context The Internet Research Agency (IRA) is a notorious Russian “troll” farm that has the strategic goal of sowing discord in the U.S. political system. On February 16, 2018 Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III indicted 13 Russian individuals and three Russian organizations for engaging in operations to interfere with U.S. political and electoral processes. Content Facebook data: - 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. 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 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. For more Twitter data, see: ([Link #1][1]), ([Link #2][2]). Acknowledgements Dataset description adapted from [original source][3]. Banner Image by [Rob Walsh from Unsplash][4]. Raw Data from [House Intelligence Committee][5]. Supplementary Data from both [DataWorld][6] and [Russian Ad Explorer][7]. All data was published using Open Data Licenses. Inspiration Did Russia attempt to influence a foreign election? Can Facebook ads be used to promote political divisions? [1]: https://www.kaggle.com/fivethirtyeight/russian-troll-tweets [2]: https://www.kaggle.com/vikasg/russian-troll-tweets [3]: https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/ [4]: https://unsplash.com/photos/_KeC-qyKLPY [5]: https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/ [6]: https://data.world/scottcame/us-house-psci-social-media-ads/ [7]: https://russian-ad-explorer.github.io/?ad_id=3311