Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, pulled no punches in expressing his disappointment with Twitter representatives who showed up to brief lawmakers investigating Russian election interference.
Warner said Twitter did nothing more than piggyback on Facebook's recent discovery of 470 fake profiles, searching its platform for those same already-identified accounts. Twitter told both Senate and House investigators it found just 200 accounts that seemed to be attached to Russia's extensive disinformation campaign. As The New York Times notes, 200 is far less than outside investigators have discovered themselves.
In a statement posted on its own blog, Twitter added it discovered that Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin-linked news outlet, "spent $274,100 in U.S. ads in 2016 and that three Twitter accounts linked to RT "promoted 1,823 Tweets that definitely or potentially targeted the U.S. market."
Twitter goes on to explain the various ways it says it's working to combat spam and bots, but according to Senator Warner, the company's presentation before Congress “showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions and again begs many more questions than they offered.”