Hello and welcome to Morales and the first installment of our numbers of the year.

We've contacted our fellow stat seekers from across the globe to tell us which figures made waves in 2018.

First up this week, one country in particular has dominated headlines across the globe for less than positive reasons.

Russia has been accused of carrying out a botched assassination attempt in Britain, cyber attacks around the world and meddling in international politics.

Before that in mind, let's hear our first number.

My number of the year is 9 million 41,308.

We like them big.

That's the total number of tweets that we know the Russian troll farm posted between 2014 and June of this year.

Ben Nimo is Information Defense Fellow at Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

He analysed data released this year by the biggest social media platforms.

The Russian troll farm is an organisation sometimes known as the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg,

which is a group of several hundred people paid by an oligarch very close to the Kremlin,

who basically spent 12 hours a day online and masquerading as citizens of various western countries,

and posting all kinds of political and inflammatory comments, particularly about the US election.

According to leaks from the troll farm, it's running well over a thousand accounts,

and it's got an audience of well over a million people.

Over the 9 million plus tweets, slightly more than half were in Russian.

They were saying that the Russian opposition and its leaders are in the pay of the CIA

or in the pay of any particular western government you would care to name.

And it's always worth bearing in mind that the Russian troll operations started off as a way for the government to attack its own critics domestically.

Ben told us that just under half of the output was in English, with those tweets focusing on the United States.

In 2016, they were very heavily engaged in attacking Hillary Clinton,

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