Twitter Revealed Almost 700,000 Users Were Influenced By Russian Propaganda In 2016 Elections

Twitter has finally come up with the statistics related to the Russian Propaganda efforts in the US presidential election. According to the blogging social media platform, it has unveiled that almost 700,000 Twitter users were exposed to the Russian campaign. The issue arises when it was founded that Russia has used the social media platforms to influence the 2016 US presidential elections. Twitter, also reported that more than 50,000 thousand accounts were found linked to the Russian government, posting and tweeting related to the 2016 elections.

Today, Twitter revealed that it has uncovered many new accounts on the platform linked to the Internet Research Agency, or IRA, an organization having a connection with the Kremlin. The social media platform first shared the complete report of the accounts back in November to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. The committee held a meeting where Facebook, Google, and Twitter were questioned about their effective role in the Russian campaign to intimidate the 2016 US elections. All the platforms were accused of not being aware and letting the Russian government support the Donald Trump to get elected. According to the reports millions of posts were generated from Russia based accounts on these platforms to influence the presidential elections back in 2016.

However, Twitter stated that it has been analyzing and doing deep research on the issue for some time now and has uncovered new accounts. “Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period,” Twitter posted in a blog on January 19. “Because we have already suspended these accounts, the relevant content on Twitter is no longer publicly available.”

After getting a hit from the US intelligence on the Russian Cyber Intelligence campaign Twitter said it's enhancing the platform’s surveillance. The company has added more automated methods to find out the suspicious accounts and post controlled by the bots. In addition to this, it has also leveled up the security measure to control the content flowing over the platform. Twitter said it has successfully recognized 6.3 million suspicious accounts in December 2017 with these changes.