TODAY: Twitter Speaks To Congress On Russia Probe

CNN reports:

Officials from Twitter will trek to Capitol Hill on Thursday to talk to congressional Russia investigators about how Russian-linked accounts may have used the social media platform to try to sway the 2016 election.

Twitter officials will meet behind closed doors with Senate intelligence committee staff to discuss Russian efforts to use Twitter during the 2016 election, as well as potential changes ahead of the next US election cycle.

Twitter is the second social media company to meet with the congressional panels investigating Russia’s election meddling, as Facebook also briefed the Senate and House intelligence committees. Facebook later disclosed it had discovered it sold $100,000 worth of election ads to Russian-linked accounts, which it has pledged to share with the congressional committees soon.

More from Politico:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official said the Russian use of Twitter is “consistent” with what U.S. intelligence agencies found in their election post-mortem, which concluded that hackers associated with Vladimir Putin’s regime had interfered in the presidential campaign. That includes “the methodology of using multiple different lanes in an information operations campaign,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigation.

Twitter’s power to influence the news cycle makes it a convenient tool, people who have studied the social network’s role in the election say. “The fastest way to move a story from outlying media to mainstream media is to promote it on Twitter,” said Clint Watts, a counterterrorism expert and former FBI agent who has studied Russian influence campaigns. “All mainstream media is watching Twitter and it spreads organically from there to other platforms.”