On February 23, Twitter published a dataset containing accounts and tweets that have been removed by Twitter due their relationship to the Russian government, The Internet Research Agency and GRU Russian Military Intelligence. Twitter “found and removed a network of 69 fake accounts that can be reliably tied to Russian state actors,” and “31 accounts from two networks that show signs of being affiliated with The Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Russian government-linked actors.”
The Internet Research Agency (commonly referred to as the St. Petersburg Troll Factory) is an organization directed by Yevgeni Prigozhin, who is a close associate of Russian President, Vladimir Putin. The IRA, including Prigozhin, were indicted by the United States in February 2018 for interfering in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections. Prigozhin and the IRA have been placed on the US, UK and EU sanctions lists, but have not been placed on Canada’s.
The Kremlin’s foreign disinformation and influence operations target the cohesion of western alliances, such as NATO and the European Union. They seek to subvert western democracies and societies by spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation intended to disrupt democratic processes, discredit elected officials and polarize societies.
According to Twitter, a large number of the deleted accounts and tweets focused on “undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.” DisinfoWatch analyzed the Twitter datasets and identified a total of 327 deleted Tweets that mention Canada and Canadian political leaders, posted between 2009-2021 from the 101 deleted Russian government affiliated accounts.
An additional 6,365 tweets targeted issues of Canadian national interest – including NATO, Ukraine, The Lima Group, Venezuela and others.
The tweets from the Internet Research Agency include disinformation on topics that range from COVID-19, the Arctic, Canada’s position on Venezuela, NATO and elected Canadian officials, including Justin Trudeau, Stephen Harper and Chrystia Freeland.
One tweet ahead of the 2019 federal election, claimed that Chrystia Freeland is a “shameless warmonger”.
A sample of other tweets in the dataset that target Canada:
Among the deleted IRA Tweets are 30 from Vladimir Putin’s personal think tank, Valdai Club that mention Canada. The Valdai Club account was removed by Twitter around 2018.
In addition to the tweets about Canada, the Valdai Club account tweeted disinformation narratives about Sergei Magnitsky and Magnitsky legislation at least 30 times. Some examples below:
A CSV containing Russian Internet Research Agency tweets containing Canadian references can be downloaded here. The entire dataset can be downloaded from Twitter here.
