IANS | 20 Jan, 2018
Twitter has
identified an additional 1,062 accounts associated with the Russia-backed
Internet Research Agency (IRA) accused of interfering with the 2016 US
presidential election.
This brings IRA-linked accounts to a total of 3,814 that posted 175,993 tweets,
approximately 8.4 per cent of which were election-related, the micro-blogging
platform said in a blog post on Saturday.
"We are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the US who followed
one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during
the election period," Twitter said, adding that it has already suspended
these accounts.
Twitter has told a US Senate committee that the micro-blogging platform is
working towards alerting its users who may have seen Kremlin-linked
advertisements during the 2016 election.
Appearing before the US Commerce, Science and Technology Committee this week,
Carlos Monje, Twitter's Director of US Public Policy, said Twitter would
'inform individually' everyone who saw tweets from accounts linked to IRA.
Monje, along with officials from Facebook and Google-owned YouTube, testified
before the committee about how Twitter is combating terror-related content on
its platform.
"We have also provided Congress with the results of our supplemental
analysis into activity believed to be automated, election-related activity
originating out of Russia during the election period," Twitter said.
Through its supplemental analysis, Twitter has also identified 13,512
additional accounts, for a total of 50,258 automated accounts that it identified
as Russian-linked and tweeting election-related content during the election
period.
"With our current capabilities, we detect and block approximately 523,000
suspicious logins daily for being generated through automation," Twitter
posted.
In December 2017, its systems identified and challenged more than 6.4 million
suspicious accounts globally per week -- a 60 per cent increase in its
detection rate from October 2017.
"We have developed new techniques for identifying malicious automation
(such as near-instantaneous replies to tweets, non-random Tweet timing, and
coordinated engagement)," the company said.
Since June 2017, Twitter has removed more than 220,000 applications in
violation of its rules, collectively responsible for more than 2.2 billion low-quality
tweets.
In 2018, Twitter aims to invest further in machine-learning capabilities that
help it detect and mitigate the effect on users of fake, coordinated, and
automated account activity.