Twitter Hands Over Russia Today Account Information To Congress

Twitter is taking a hint from Facebook and handing over information to Congress about accounts that may have been used for malicious purposes or for misinformation around the 2016 Presidential elections. The company’s Vice President for Public Policy, Colin Crowell, met with staff from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about the issues the social media platform faced, according to a blog post from Twitter.

Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social media company would also be handing over in information to Congress about accounts that were found on the site and believed to be used for advertising during the election. Both companies have found accounts they believe were used for propaganda-like advertising.

Twitter’s blog post said that while the company won’t be able to divulge every detail of information it gives to the United States government it will try to be as transparent through the process as possible. Starting with the release of information Thursday.

Twitter said that of the more than 400 accounts found through Facebook’s review, Twitter found 22 corresponding accounts on its own site. The company said all of those accounts had either previously been suspended or were immediately after they were found.

Those 22 accounts led the company to another 179 related or linked accounts and the company also took action on those accounts which were found to be in violation of the social media platform’s rules. The company also pointed out that none of these accounts were registered advertisers on the site.

Twitter also handed over information about three Russia Today accounts that the US intelligence committee had previously identified as accounts that had allegedly sought to interfere with the election. These accounts were identified as having close ties to the Russian government. Early findings from Twitter show that the Russia Today accounts spent $274,100 in U.S. advertising during the 2016 election year and the accounts promoted more than 1,500 tweets that definitely or possibly targeted the U.S. news market.

These findings among others were handed over to the U.S. government and Twitter said, “This is an ongoing process and we will continue to collaborate with investigators.”

Since the election Twitter says it has made several changes to make the platform a safer place for users and is looking to continue making it a better place for users who would like more transparency. “ As patterns of malicious activity evolve, we’re adapting to meet them head-on,” said the blog post from Twitter. Already the company said it catches more than 3 million suspicious accounts every week, which is more than double what they were finding with their automated systems a year ago.

In addition to catching these accounts the company is working on automated means to find non-human activity patterns, cluster accounts, false positives and more. These attempts go hand in hand with efforts to detect human-directed accounts and content on the platform as well.

Some new features will be coming out over the next few weeks or months that will help increase the detection of “spammy and suspicious activity.”