Menlo Park (US), Oct 14 (AP) Twitter has handed over toSenate investigators the profile names, or "handles," of 201accounts linked to Russian attempts at influencing the 2016presidential election.
The company has stepped up its efforts to cooperate withinvestigators after it was criticised for not takingcongressional probes seriously enough.
The handover occurred this week, according to a personfamiliar with the matter who was not authorised to speakpublicly about it.
What remains unclear is whether posts associated withthose accounts have been deleted from Twitter's servers.
Politico reported yesterday that the company had deletedthe tweets in line with its privacy policy. Twitter had nocomment on that report.
The company's policy calls for removing tweets that auser deletes on their own. But that policy also states thatsome tweets can survive the process. For instance, retweets ofdeleted tweets will remain live if the retweeter added acomment. Twitter also can't remove tweets that have beentemporarily stored, or "cached," by services such as Google orreposted on other sites.
Twitter might be able to recover some information aboutany deleted tweets, according to another person familiar withthe situation who requested anonymity because of thesensitivity of the investigation. That person added that thecompany is working with investigators to find informationthat's useful.
The account handles previously hadn't been submitted inpart due to legal privacy issues, the person said.
Twitter is set to appear November 1 before the Senateintelligence committee at a public hearing. Both Facebook andGoogle have been invited to testify at the same hearing.
Twitter previously uncovered the accounts linked toRussia's Internet Research Agency, a notorious "troll farm"known for pushing out pro-Russian positions via fake accounts,by using information provided by Facebook, which found 470Russia-linked pages or accounts.
After looking for patterns linking those accounts andpages to accounts on its service, Twitter said it hadsuspended 22 accounts that pushed divisive social or politicalissues during the 2016 campaign.
It found another 179 related or linked accounts and tookaction against those that violated its spam rules.
The company enforces an anti-spam policy against bots andhuman users that exhibit unusual behavior. Such flags includehaving multiple accounts repeatedly retweet the same posts orhaving multiple accounts follow or block other users.
After Twitter's initial closed-door briefing with theSenate committee late last month, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner,the top Democrat on the committee, called the company'sfindings "frankly inadequate " and "derivative" of Facebook'swork. (AP)CPS.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.