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Twitter contacts users who interacted with Russian-linked propaganda during US election

Twitter will be contacting 677,775 people who followed, retweeted or liked posts from a Russian government-linked organisation in the lead up to the US election.

The social networking site had previously identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to the organisation, known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

The accounts successfully managed to circulate pro-Trump, anti-Clinton propaganda, some of which went viral in the lead up to the election.

In its latest update, Twitter explained it would be “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.

“Because we have already suspended these accounts, the relevant content on Twitter is no longer publicly available.”

Twitter shared examples of the kinds of tweets the IRA would typically post.

The investigation has identified an additional 1,062 accounts associated with the IRA, all of which Twitter has suspended.

IRA account handles have been handed over to the United States Congress, which is currently conducting a review into events surrounding the 2016 election.

“In total, during the time period we investigated, the 3,814 identified IRA-linked accounts posted 175,993 Tweets, approximately 8.4% of which were election-related,” it added.

As part of Congress’ review, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are all currently investigating how they can better prevent fake news and propaganda circulating on their sites.

In 2018, Twitter intends to investigate the capabilities of machine-learning to help detect “fake, coordinated, and automated account activity.” It also plans to limit the ability of users to perform coordinated actions across multiple accounts in Tweetdeck, and enforce stricter rules surrounding the use of bots and automation.

Facebook has recently announced several major changes to its news feed, including plans to allow users to vote on a publications’ trustworthiness and prioritising posts from friends and family over news.

YouTube is currently implementing stricter criteria to ensure “bad actors” don’t receive a share of the advertising dollar.

Disclosures sent to US Congress last October revealed Russian agents published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter, reached over 126 million users on Facebook, and uploaded over 1,000 videos to Google’s YouTube service.

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