A dataset of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Tweets about the Russo-Ukrainian war

Abstract

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) refers to intelligence efforts based on freely available data. It has become a frequent topic of conversation on social media, where private users or networks can share their findings. Such data is highly valuable in conflicts, both for gaining a new understanding of the situation as well as for tracking the spread of misinformation. In this paper, we present a method for collecting such data as well as a novel OSINT dataset for the Russo-Ukrainian war drawn from Twitter between January 2022 and July 2023. It is based on an initial search of users posting OSINT and a subsequent snowballing approach to detect more. The final dataset contains almost 2 million Tweets posted by 1040 users. We also provide some first analyses and experiments on the data, and make suggestions for its future usage.