Twitter a growing focus of Senate Russia probe

Source: Politico | September 20, 2017 | Nancy Scola and Josh Meyer

Of particular interest is the prominence of bots on Twitter, and what role they may have played in making misleading campaign season tweets go viral.

The Senate’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is about to turn its sights on Twitter.

The company has agreed to meet with the Intelligence Committee’s staff investigators in Washington on a specific date before mid-October, according to a source close to the investigation. Twitter will discuss the role its platform played in the distribution of Russian disinformation during the presidential campaign, the source said.

While Facebook — and its giant user base — has garnered much of the early attention in the Senate’s investigation, Twitter is also emerging as an area of interest. Twitter has a much smaller user base than Facebook, but its ability to inject information into the U.S. media ecosystem has become a focus of investigators.

Of particular interest is the prominence of bots — or automated accounts used to post and amplify information — on Twitter, and what role they may have played in making misleading campaign season tweets go viral. Investigators are also looking at how stories and memes distributed by Russian actors on Twitter found their way onto U.S. news sites, particularly conservative-leaning outlets.

In addition, investigators are exploring whether the popularity of Russian-linked posts promoting “fake news” stories boosted those stories’ ranking in Google search results. They are also probing whether Russians might have used Twitter to quietly pass along damaging information to collaborators — similar to the way the site has been used by political action committees to share information with political campaigns with which they’re legally prohibited from coordinating.

……

Tagged: ,

Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic.