Twitter dropped an almost unfathomably large archive of tweets connected to two alleged influence campaigns on Wednesday. The trove included over 9 million tweets associated with 3,841 accounts connected to Russia’s notorious Internet Research Agency, or IRA, as well as more than a million tweets attributed to a network of 770 Iranian propaganda-pushing accounts. Twitter has never before released an archive of this size. But researchers tell WIRED that it says more about the past than it does about present or future threats Twitter should be wary of with important midterm elections less than three weeks away.

The data provides an interesting historical account of the early tactics employed by the IRA and Iran, but it isn’t particularly useful for trying to understand what these groups, or others, are doing now to influence conversations and the upcoming election, says Clemson University professor Darren Linvill. He and professor Patrick Warren have been analyzing and tracking the IRA’s activity on Twitter for years; until Wednesday’s data dump, they were responsible for compiling one of the most comprehensive archives of IRA tweets. They’ve also been tracking ongoing IRA activity, which they describe as unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.

“With each passing year they [the IRA] get more and more sophisticated,” said Linvill. “And the work they’re doing right now is very sophisticated. They gain followers really, really quickly, and their messages spread better than they did in previous years.”

Shifting Tactics

Early on, Linvill says, the IRA mostly targeted Russians in Russian, relying on memes, links, and specific hashtag campaigns rather than more personality-driven posting. The group later expanded its focus to include politics around the world, and US issues in particular. As agents grew more advanced, their fake accounts turned to hot-button issues in American society. The IRA would devote time to creating elaborate fake news and even posted stories on CNN’s community pages, as Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, pointed out on Twitter. In response to Twitter’s 2017 crackdown on IRA accounts, they turned to automation rather than continue posting individually.

In June, Twitter said it had shut down more than 70 million accounts in May and June alone. But the company did not identify any specific accounts as being linked to the IRA, and it has been silent on the subject since. Linvill says it seems highly unlikely that all of the IRA operatives simply just disappeared. If Twitter really wanted to help researchers and the public gain a better understanding of what groups like the IRA are up to now, they would release the names of any IRA-linked accounts in recent months. "This would give us a much better idea of current IRA tactics." (Twitter declined a request for comment.)

Without more recent information on the IRA’s activities, Linvill says, it’s extremely difficult to discern what threats platforms like Twitter should be prepared for as the US gears up for midterm elections. “Two-year-old data is history,” said Linvill, “I think researchers and journalists would really like to know what's happening now” according to Twitter.

Much of the data Twitter released Wednesday had previously been made public. In February, NBC News released 200,000 tweets tied to “malicious activity” in the 2016 US presidential election from the over 3,000 accounts associated with the IRA. Five months later, Linvill and Warren published 3 million more. Though Twitter hadn’t previously named all 770 Iranian accounts, around half of those had been identified by independent cybersecurity company FireEye in August. The bulk of the truly new data dated from before June 2015, as this information wasn’t previously accessible to those outside of Twitter due to GDPR-related restrictions.