UPDATE: Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, weighed in Thursday.
“I appreciate that Twitter continues to take steps to address this problem. I have some concern that these numbers continue to grow, but I think it is critical that Twitter — and the other social media platforms — be completely up front with their users about the extent of this attack.”
— Sen. Mark Warner
Warner concerned over rise in people exposed to Russian-linked tweets (Axios)
Twitter posted Wednesday that the company now has notified approximately 1.4 million people that they interacted with an account created and run by the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA), and this number still is not all-inclusive.
The notification marks a sharp increase in the number of U.S.-based Twitter users notified. Only two days ago, Twitter notified just 677,775 people of their potential interaction with the Russian accounts.
Our notice efforts are focused on certain types of interactions, and they will not encompass every person that ever saw this content.
(...)
We have now sent notices to Twitter users with an active email address who our records indicate are based in the US and fall into at least one of the following categories:
- People who directly engaged during the election period with the 3,814 IRA-linked accounts we identified, either by Retweeting, quoting, replying to, mentioning, or liking those accounts or content created by those accounts;
- People who were actively following one of the identified IRA-linked accounts at the time those accounts were suspended; and
- People who opt out of receiving most email updates from Twitter and would not have received our initial notice based on their email settings.
Twitter says it intends to survey a sample of notified users for feedback on the process and will issue updates as needed.
Twitter notifies 1.4 million of interaction with Russian accounts (CBS News)
Update on Twitter’s Review of the 2016 U.S. Election (Twitter)