On May 10, 2018, Democrats on the United States House Intelligence Committee released 3,500+ ads created by the Internet Research Agency between 2015 and 2017. The Internet Research Agency is believed to have created these ads to influence the outcome of the 2016 United States presidential election, and in general influence Americans' political views.

This Github repository contains code for a visualization tool to view these ads, which can be viewed at this link: https://russian-ad-explorer.github.io. Extensive documentation on design and presentation choices for this visualization tool can be found on the About page of the explorer. The data that powers this tool is hosted on these Github repositories: russian-ad-datasets and russian-ads-pdfs.

You can read about a few more technical notes below.

• Data Hosting with Github LFS
• Sorting and Filtering with filter.js
• Contact

PDFs, extracted images (cropped, and resized to smaller resolutions), extracted text, and a JSON object containing metadata and some qualitative labeling of the data can be found here: russian-ad-datasets and russian-ads-pdfs.

This explorer is built on the filter.js library (link). I have a modified version of filter.js in this explorer that has a few additional lines in the "pagination" section to add features to the thumbnails.

If you have any requests, or questions regarding this dataset and explorer, send a message to [email protected]. I would love to hear any feedback you may have — this is an entirely informal effort, and I'll try to incorporate any suggestions as I have time.