Tierney Sneed contributed reporting.
In an unattributed statement on the company blog published Thursday afternoon, Twitter disclosed that it had identified nearly 200 accounts associated with the same Facebook pages that were part of a Russian troll farm’s $100,000 ad buy on that platform.
Twitter said it had searched for accounts associated with the “roughly 450” Facebook pages shared as part of that company’s review. Twitter found 22 accounts that directly corresponded to the Russian Facebook accounts, and then found 179 others associated with those Twitter users.
Facebook shared those accounts directly with Twitter, TPM has learned; Congress still does not have the ads Facebook promised to share with elected officials, though those ads are expected by Monday.
“Neither the original accounts shared by Facebook, nor the additional related accounts we identified, were registered as advertisers on Twitter,” the statement read. “However, we continue to investigate these issues, and will take action on anything that violates our Terms of Service.”
The statement came after Twitter representatives met investigators from the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. Alongside Facebook, Twitter is at the center of both congressional and federal inquiries into the Trump campaign’s role, if any, in Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The social media company also said in the statement that Kremlin-backed news outlet RT purchased $274,000 in advertisements in 2016. It’s unclear how that figure compares to RT’s spending on Twitter in other years, or how it compares to Twitter ad budgets at news organizations of similar size.
“In [2016], the @RT_com, @RT_America, and @ActualidadRT accounts promoted 1,823 Tweets that definitely or potentially targeted the U.S. market,” the Twitter statement’s authors wrote. “These campaigns were directed at followers of mainstream media and primarily promoted RT Tweets regarding news stories.”
RT undertook a major expansion into the United States in 2013, and since the election it has been the subject of intensifying scrutiny, first from an official assessment by the US intelligence community and more recently directly from the DOJ, which has asked the organization to register as a foreign agent.
Executives from the company presented their findings to Senate Intelligence Committee staff on Thursday afternoon. Intelligence Vice-chair Mark Warner (D-VA) said he was unimpressed that Twitter’s research was “based on accounts that Facebook had identified” rather than a proactive review of their user base.
Other figures Twitter provided in the statement painted a picture of a social media platform under seige: The microblogging service said it blocks some 130,000 attempts to artificially promote hashtags to its “trending topics” category each day, in addition to 450,000 suspicious other logins daily. The company also said it had identified and suspended 117,000 programs that were abusing its proprietary interface to send “low-quality tweets.” Those programs had already tweeted 1.5 billion times in 2017.
This post has been updated.
Thank you for your untangling of some of these quickly unfolding stories.
Two hundred? Don’t make me laugh. Is that 200 currently operational, or 200 in 2016, or what? You can be sure that many thousands of accounts have been set up since there would be no earthly reason not to.
I’m SHOCKED! A media organization, trying to build its brand, advertising on Twitter! Given the fact that only 7% of Americans have a Twitter account, and that, unless you’re watching Twitter, attentively, all day long, you miss 99% of what passes through your feed, and that you’d have to actively follow these alleged Russian provocateurs in order to have any significant chance to even see their tweets, let alone be influenced by them, so friggin’ what? Meanwhile, Republican’t governors actively denied the vote to millions of Americans, and Fox News is on every cable system in America dumping billions of gallons of Fake News toxic waste into American politics every single day. Seriously! Worrying about the Big Bad Red Menace on social media is like obsessing about a single, long, protruding nose hair while the rest of your body is covered with fire ants…
Except that it’s not a media organization. It’s Kremlin propaganda under the very thin guise of respectability. Make the news. Spread the news, Influence the voters, A small, properly targeted campaign can have an outsize influence especially thanks to our electoral system.
I discount all these “Russian connection” reports, they are always vague hand waves. How were these accounts associated with Russia? How do we know that the additional accounts associated with these accounts are anything relevant at all? And most important of all, what was the content of these tweets, blog posts and ads Russia supposedly paid to distribute? The content would tell us if any of this stuff has political application rather than just a business promoting itself or its products.
The only good that could come out of this “Russia did it” nonsense would be an article with many specific examples, how we know they come from Russia, who the target audience was, whether they are factual, and how the manipulation is supposed to work..
I’m betting that in the end, nothing specific, nothing incontrovertibly authored by Russia, will ever be published. It’s just birtherism, DNC style. This will be clear by 2020, and the credibility of the Democratic party will take a huge hit. It is clever to make an accusation that is nearly impossible to refute (you can’t prove a negative.), but I think in time the voters will figure out it’s just another DNC lie.