Promoted tweets and account names are all the social network has handed over. Investigators think that’s just the start of what Twitter has on its servers.
When it came time to turn over material critical to the Senate’s Russia investigation, all Twitter initially provided was a batch of tweets that the Kremlin’s English-language news network paid the company to promote, The Daily Beast has learned.
That’s just a sliver of what investigators believe to be Russia’s propaganda campaign on the social network—which helps explain the dissatisfaction that followed those first disclosures.
The already-public tweets, along with a list of 201 suspected Russian-propaganda accounts, represent the sum total of relevant material the social media company has given Senate investigators thus far, according to a source familiar with the investigation.
Twitter turned over the promoted tweets, contained on a thumb drive, late last month. It was the company’s first attempt to explain to Congress how the Kremlin used Twitter to push propaganda.
The thumb drive didn’t contain information on the surreptitious bots and trolls that amplified Russian messaging while masquerading as Americans. Nor did it shed any light on the 201 Twitter accounts suspected to be Kremlin imposters that the company publicly identified in a blog post.
Instead, the thumb drive contained promoted tweets from the Kremlin’s English-language news network, Russia Today (RT).
The drive, according to the source familiar with the disclosure, contained 1,800 tweets that Russia Today paid Twitter $274,000 to promote. Those tweets linked to Russia Today stories, and most of the linked stories didn’t explicitly refer to the 2016 presidential contenders. Of the stories that did, most were critical of Hillary Clinton.
That limits of that disclosure help explain why Sen. Mark Warner—the top Democrat on the Senate’s Russia probe—ripped into Twitter shortly after company representatives met with Senate investigators on Sept. 28.
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Twitter is not cooperating with investigation into Russia’s meddling in 2016 U.S. election: https://t.co/21TG4mhMYt
— Anthony De Rosa 🗽 (@Anthony) October 20, 2017
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