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The committee would not release the raw data allowing a search for all Canada-specific messages. But The Canadian Press did find a few dozen anti-Keystone tweets in an unrelated data set, provided by Twitter to a U.S. congressional committee looking into meddling in the 2016 election.

Photo by Nati Harnik / AP

They included retweets of news headlines, references to oil spills, and links to blog posts like one titled: “Uh oh! Progressive fans of Justin Trudeau might be in for MAJOR buzzkill (Hint: Keystone, Trump, OMG!)”

That same file included dozens of messages about Trudeau, mostly retweets, frequently related to the prime minister’s views on refugees, Muslims, or his much-criticized flattery of deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Messages about Canada represented a minuscule percentage of the overall volume of data released by U.S. lawmakers. To put it into perspective, there were more than 203,000 tweets in the data provided by Twitter for the congressional 2016 election probe, and less than 150 mentioned Trudeau or Keystone XL.

But things like Canadian oil are a natural target, said one analyst on Russian information campaigns.

“I wouldn’t be surprised (if they’re going after Canadian oil),” said Daniel Fried, a former U.S. State Department official who co-ordinated sanctions policy for the U.S. government until 2017.

“You will find the Russians getting into all kinds of issues, deliberately stirring up debate, and trying to spin it in a malicious fashion … Of course it is ironic the Russians would use environmental arguments, for which they have no patience at home, to hurt energy infrastructure abroad.”