The business said it also found three accounts from the news site RT which Twitter connected to the Kremlin that spent $274,100 in ads on its program in 2016.
Despite the revealing, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) disputed whether the company is doing sufficient to stop Russian agents from using its platform to spread disinformation and division in U.S. society.
Warner said Twitter’s offering to a closed-door meeting of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers Thursday time was “deeply disappointing” and “inadequate on almost every level.” Twitter also made a display to House Intelligence Committee staffers in the afternoon.
The company “exhibited an enormous lack of understanding about how grave this issue is, the threat it postures to democratic institutions,” a visibly frustrated Warner said.
The meetings within the company and congressional reviewers were part of a widening administration probe into how Russian operatives used Facebook, Twitter, Google and other technology platforms to widen gaps in the United States and spread disinformation during the 2016 campaign. Those firms have come under expanding pressure from Capitol Hill to investigate Russian meddling and are facing the potentiality of new regulations that could assume their massive advertising businesses.
The Washington Post reached this week that some of the 3,000 Facebook ads bought by Russian operatives preferred African American rights groups, including Black Lives Matter. Those ads were targeted at users in specific findings such as Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, two cities that have faced violent compliant over police shootings of black men. Ads aimed at voters in other regions, meanwhile, intimated that the same groups posed a rising political threat.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter are being assembled to a public hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Nov. 1.
The Twitter accounts, which were taken down over the past month, were blended with 470 accounts and pages that Facebook this month said came from the Internet Research Agency, a Russia-connected troll farm. Twitter said the groups on Facebook had 22 similar Twitter accounts. Twitter then found an additional 179 accounts linked to those 22.
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