Twitter to tell 677,000 users of Russian con
UNITED STATES: Twitter says it will notify nearly 700,000 users who interacted with accounts the company has identified as potential pieces of a propaganda effort by the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election.
The company has also disclosed thousands of accounts that it said were associated with the Kremlinlinked troll farm, the Internet Research Agency and the Russian government, adding to numbers that it released to Congress in October.
Twitter said that it had identified 3814 IRA-linked accounts, which posted some 176,000 tweets in the 10 weeks preceding the election, and another 50, 258 automated accounts connected to the Russian government, which tweeted more than a million times, while acknowledging that ‘‘such activity represents a challenge to democratic societies everywhere,’’ in a release at the weekend.
The disclosures are the latest sign of how widely the effort to disrupt the 2016 election through disinformation permeated the services of social media companies, including Twitter, Facebook and Google.
And it is yet another instance where Twitter appears to be adjusting its service in the wake of cultural shifts exposed by Russian meddling.
US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia conducted a sophisticated campaign intended to affect the outcome of the election, which included spreading propaganda and incendiary reports on social media about subjects like police brutality, Black Lives Matter, Muslim rights, and veterans issues, and hacking Democratic officials to sow discord in the country.
Twitter has been criticised for reacting slowly to the proliferation of disinformation and bad-faith accounts on the service: @TEN_ GOP, an influential troll account that amassed a large following on the service by bolstering proTrump messages and misinformation, was reportedly the subject of impersonation complaints by the actual Republican Party of Tennessee for nearly a year before the company closed it last August, for example.
The company, along with Facebook and Google, was excoriated by lawmakers during a series of hearings on Capitol Hill in the fall, some of whom threatened legislation to address the lingering national security issues if the companies failed to take steps of their own.
At the time, Facebook acknowledged that as many as 126 million users may have seen content produced and circulated by Russian operatives.
And Google disclosed for the first time that it had found 1108 videos with 43 hours of content related to the Russian effort on YouTube.
Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia who previously has been critical of Twitter, praised its move to notify users on Saturday, saying he was ‘‘encouraged to see the company beginning to take responsibility.’’
Twitter spokeswoman Emily Horne said the company planned to send the notification to some 677,000 users who followed or engaged with Russian or IRAlinked accounts, but she declined to provide information on its contents.
The company also highlighted the changes it had made to its internal policing efforts, saying that it currently blocks about 250,000 logins that come from automated accounts a day.
- Washington Post