alex calderwood

How Americans Wound Up on Twitter's List of Russian Bots

publication journalism code

“How Americans Wound Up on Twitter’s List of Russian Bots” was published in WIRED in June 2018. We found that Twitter erroneously suspended hundreds of accounts that were owned by everyday Twitter users who had no actual connection to the Russian IRA. After publication, the accounts were reinstated, and Congress was forced to release a revised list of IRA-affiliated handles.

The peice was cowritten with two other graduate students at the Columbia Journalism school, Erin Riglin and Shreya Vaidyanathan.

This is my only published investigative piece. It involved computational journalism techniques, a graph database, and months of reporting. We were able to interview Congressional aides as well as Twitter executives.