Simon Willison’s Weblog

Analyzing US Election troll tweets with Datasette

6th August 2018

FiveThirtyEight published nearly 3 million tweets from accounts associated with the Russian “Internet Research Agency”, based on research by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren at at Clemson University.

FiveThirtyEight’s tweets were shared as CSV, so I’ve used my csvs-to-sqlite tool to convert them and used Datasette to publish them in a searchable, browsable interface: https://russian-troll-tweets.datasettes.com/

The data is most interesting if you apply faceting. Here’s the full set of tweets faceted by author, language, region, post type and account category:

The minimal source code for this Datasette instance is on GitHub.