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From major national U.S. newspapers like the Washington Post to websites for Patch and local ABC stations, for years, reporters around the country appear to have been unknowingly including tweets from Russian trolls in their news stories, as Recode first reported this week, with help from Meltwater, a media intelligence firm.
Today, we’re sharing an expanded version of the dataset, revealing the extent to which these Twitter accounts repeatedly made the news in the U.S.
A note on methodology: Meltwater searched for mentions of Russia-linked Twitter accounts — a list compiled by Twitter and published this week by members of Congress — from Jan. 1, 2016, to Sept. 30, 2017. In total, there were 2,752 such accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin’s official troll army.
The firm recorded those pages at the time of their publication. Since then, however, some of the stories have been taken down or their links are broken. With others, like the AP, obtaining caches is still difficult. And critically, it is impossible to know if the tweets were written by Russian trolls at the time they ended up in stories or if the accounts were genuine for a time — then later hijacked by Russia’s IRA. All 2,752 troll accounts have been suspended on Twitter.
In the database below, Recode removed links to lesser-known sites, including those that aren’t technically news organizations. But the dataset does include more recent stories in which publications mentioned Russian trolls in order to report on their origin.
In response to our reporting, publications including the Post, BuzzFeed and McClatchy have updated stories to remove Russian troll accounts.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
