Partnership for Countering Influence Operations

In 2018, Twitter first released a large archive of tweets and media from Russian and Iranian troll farms. This archive of information operations (IO) has since been expanded to include activity originating from more than 15 countries. Totalling more than 54,000 accounts, 160 million tweets, and over 8 TB of images, GIFs, videos, and Periscope broadcasts, the dataset is extensive and offers researchers unique insight into how IO unfolds on the service. For more on the datasets, visit Twitter’s public archive.

The Carnegie Partnership for Countering Influence Operations (PCIO) and Twitter will co-host a series of virtual workshops to grant exceptional researchers the opportunity to present their cutting-edge work on IO datasets to a community of scholars and leading experts in IO. The aim of the workshops is to support an open exchange of ideas among the research community regarding how IO can be better understood, analyzed, and mitigated.

Topics will include:

• Analysis of how and why IO and/or counter-IO activities become impactful
• Analysis of adversary and/or platform account owner behaviors, trends, and emerging risks
• Exploitation and/or mitigation of platform vulnerabilities
• Analysis of how IO and/or counter-IO activities interact with off and cross-platform activities
• Impact on at-risk communities, including targeting of journalists and activists
• Analysis from product, policy, ethical, legal, and/or regulatory perspectives
• Innovative and experimental research design and digital methodologies, including open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysis methods
• Methods for measuring and evaluating IO and/or counter-IO effectiveness