Twitter finds 1,062 more Russia-linked accounts

Twitter said it found another 1,062 accounts linked to the Russian governmentbacked Internet Research Agency accused of trying to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

The social media company said it’s emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the US who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period, according to a blog post Friday. That’s almost 1 per cent of Twitter’s 69 million monthly active users in the US The new IRA accounts are in addition to 2,752 accounts Twitter found and disclosed last year.

All the IRA-related accounts have been suspended and the company is sharing information about them with congressional investigators who are reviewing potential manipulation in the 2016 election. During the time period Twitter investigated, the 3,814 identified IRA-linked accounts posted 175,993 Tweets, about 8.4 per cent of which were election-related.

“After the 2016 election, we launched our Information Quality initiative to further develop strategies to detect and prevent bad actors from abusing our platform,” the company said in the post. “We have since made significant improvements, while recognizing that we have more to do as these patterns of activity develop and shift over time.”

Twitter also said its second assessment found another 13,512 Russian-linked automated accounts, for a total of 50,258, that tweeted electionrelated content during the 10 weeks before the 2016 election. Last year, when Twitter first disclosed the existence of these accounts, the company said the bots were responsible for about 1.4 million automated, electionrelated tweets.