Twitter released a statement on Friday concerning its investigation into Russian propaganda efforts during the 2016 presidential election. In the report, the social media platform announced that they contacted 677,775 users about interactions with over 50,000 troll accounts linked to the Russian government. With connections to the Kremlin, the IRA, or the Internet Research Agency, was responsible for most of the accounts.
Last November, the information was first presented to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. Looking into Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other social media platforms, the committee investigated the potential role of the Russian government in the 2016 election. Even now, Twitter is continuing to uncover Russian-linked accounts and information from their cybercampaign. The content is no longer visible on the platform because they have taken down the related accounts and tweets.
Twitter detailed the changes made to prevent this from happening in the future:
With our current capabilities, we detect and block approximately 523,000 suspicious logins daily for being generated through automation. In December 2017, our systems identified and challenged more than 6.4 million suspicious accounts globally per weekโ a 60% increase in our 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). We have improved our phone verification process and introduced new challenges, including reCAPTCHAs to validate that a human is in control of an account.
They are continuing to develop new ways of dealing with and identifying bot accounts while limiting the abilities for people to tweet across multiple accounts. Using these new methods of detection, Twitter was able to detect and terminate over 6.4 million accounts being run by third-party applications last December. This was a 60 percent increase from two months prior.
What are your thoughts on the issue? Were you contacted by Twitter? Let us know in the comments below!
