Twitter, With Accounts Linked to Russia, to Face Congress Over Role in Election

After a weekend when Americans took to social media to debate President Trump’s admonishment of National Football League players who do not stand for the national anthem, a network of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia seized on both sides of the issue with hashtags such as #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee.

As Twitter prepared to brief staff members of the Senate and House intelligence committees on Sept 28 for their investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, researchers from a public policy group have been following hundreds of accounts to track the continuing Russian operations to influence social media discourse and foment division in the United States. There is evidence that Twitter may have been used even more extensively than Facebook in the Russian influence campaign in 2016. In addition to Russia-linked Twitter accounts that posed as Americans, the platform was also used for large-scale automated messaging, using “bot” accounts to spread false stories and promote news articles about emails from Democratic operatives that had been obtained by Russian hackers.