Twitter Says It Exposed Nearly 700,000 People To Russian Propaganda During Election (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Twitter this evening released a new set of statistics related to its investigation on Russia propaganda efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including that 677,775 people were exposed to social media posts from more than 50,000 automated accounts with links to the Russian government. Many of the new accounts uncovered have been traced back to an organization called the the Internet Research Agency, or IRA, with known ties to the Kremlin. The data was first presented in an incomplete form to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last November, which held hearings to question Facebook, Google, and Twitter on the role the respective platforms and products played in the Russian effort to help elect President Donald Trump. Twitter says it's now uncovered more accounts and new information on the wide-reaching Russian cyberintelligence campaign.

"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," writes Twitter's public policy division in a blog post published today. "Because we have already suspended these accounts, the relevant content on Twitter is no longer publicly available."

Comments

Twitter? What is it?

[comodoro]

Is it that ad ridden social network full of crackpots, some of them threatening with nuclear war? Does anybody sane still use it?

Meanwhile...

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

The rest of the world just takes it as a given that they're being exposed to American propaganda.

There is a huge whiff of "us be bad guys, us get taste of own medicine? Unpossible!"

Maybe if the Democrats had run Sanders and not Felonia Von Pantsuit, they wouldn't have given the Russians such a target-rich environment.

Look, it's not hard. If Clinton were the Foreign Minister of any of our NATO allies, her government would have put her in prison for a very long time for even a third of what she's accused of doing.

Re:Nope

[Kneo24]

Why should it work that way? It's just an easy cop out to not provide evidence. If you don't feel like participating in the discussion, then don't participate at all, instead of proudly proclaiming that you're not going to hop into in good faith.

Re:Nope

[RedK]

At this point, any shred of evidence would suffice. It's been a whole year of people talking and talking and no one even showing a shred of evidence.

At least if you provided ANYTHING, it would give us something to actually talk about. At this point, this is just people shouting over each other's head, and the Democrats showing they are sore losers who can't accept their candidate's failing.

Re:Because altering trends isn't ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The translation of all this is "the candidate we were supporting with everything we had lost, and we're gonna get even by whatever lies we have to tell".

Re:Nope

[Entrope]

If someone asks for evidence, present the most compelling and convincing evidence you have. It is a lame dodge, and implicit admission that you have nothing, to demand that someone else define a standard of evidence -- because you would then just argue about their definition instead of providing evidence.

Re:Nope

[hey!]

That doesn't work because what convinces me won't necessarily convince you. That's because of differences in Bayesian prior beliefs.

Some people also like to waste your time demanding you marshal information they have no intention of looking at. It's like playing a game where they don't tell you the rules, or are free to change the rules to suit themselves.