Twitter Emailing Users Who Retweeted, Liked Or Followed Russian-Linked Accounts

On Friday night, Twitter began emailing U.S. users notifying them that they have followed, liked or retweeted tweets from Russian government-linked accounts.

The email alert came as the company revealed more information about their internal investigation regarding Russia’s role on Twitter during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Twitter Discovers New Russia-Linked Accounts

Back in November 2017, Twitter revealed it had discovered Twitter has 2,752 accounts tied to the Russian troll farm. In Friday’s public update, the company said it found 1,062 additional accounts associated with the Russian government-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA).

“We have suspended all of these accounts for Terms of Service violations, primarily spam, and all but a few accounts, which were restored to legitimate users, remain suspended,” Twitter said in a post. “At the request of congressional investigators, we are also sharing those account handles with Congress. In total, during the time period we investigated, the 3,814 identified IRA-linked accounts posted 175,993 Tweets, approximately 8.4% of which were election-related.”

Twitter provided examples of IRA content that circulated on the platform. The social media company tried to downplay Twitter users’ engagement with the Russian accounts saying: “Most user engagement was with a very small number of IRA-associated accounts.”

Twitter also handed over information to Congress on automated, election-related activity coming from Russia during the 2016 campaign. The platform said it found an additional 13,512 additional accounts. The newly discovered accounts brings the total number of Russian bots to 50,258.

Twitter Emails Users Over Russia-Linked Accounts

The social media platform said 677,775 U.S. users followed, retweeted or liked a tweet from accounts associated with the IRA during the election period. Twitter notified users about their activity on Friday in an email.

Twitter told users:

“Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing you because we have reason to believe that you either followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked content from these accounts during the election period. This is purely for your own information purposes, and is not related to a security concern for your account.

We are sharing this information so that you can learn more about these accounts and the nature of the Russian propaganda effort. You can see examples of content from these suspended accounts on our blog if you're interested.”

The email and information on additional Russian-linked accounts come after Twitter last week failed to meet the deadline Congress gave the company to turn over information on Russia’s use of the platform in the 2016 election.