According to data recently released by Twitter, more than 677,000 people interacted with Russian propaganda tweets during the most recent United States election.
The data was made public and was submitted first in incomplete form to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last November.
This commission investigates and discusses the role of various online platforms — like Facebook, Google, and Twitter — in spreading the Russian propaganda that helped elect current US President Donald Trump.
As the data was made public, Twitter found out the 677,775 accounts were exposed to Russian propaganda. The company said that they have e-mailed these accounts and informed them that tweets made by Russian bot accounts may have affected their decisions in the most ecent US election.
In addition, Twitter suspended accounts of those suspected to spread Russian propaganda. As a result, their posted content is no longer available on Twitter itself. However, the company did save screenshot samples of tweets from the so-called bot accounts.
The company also said that they are currently improving their detection methods to further protect the platform from bots and fake accounts. They are also making systems so that third-party software cannot manipulate a number of Twitter accounts all at once.
Twitter claimed to have discovered 6.4 million bot accounts in December 2017 using the new methods they formulated. This is a 60 percent increase in their detection rate compared to October 2017. The company also removed more that 220,000 third-party applications that were responsible for suspicious tweets due to automatically posting updates via their application programming interface (API).
Twitter says that they released the data regarding the accounts due to their increasing commitment in transparency.
"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," the company said in a blog post.
