In the fall of 2017, when Americans were debating if athletes should kneel during the U.S. national anthem as a form of protest, Russian trolls on Twitter tried to inject the controversy into Canada.
“The Canadian Football League is Protesting THEIR OWN National Anthem!” tweeted the account @chirrismogui.
“Canadian NHL Player CONSIDERING ‘Taking a Knee’ During U.S. Anthem,” wrote another account, @brristasi.
These tweets and accounts — along with millions of others — have since been deleted after being outed as trolls with the Internet Research Agency, a company in St. Petersburg with ties to Russian government intelligence.
They are part of a cache of some 3 million archived tweets recently pulled together by two American researchers. And the newly released data sheds further