Twitter told lawmakers investigating election interference that it had found about 200 accounts linked to Russian disinformation, far fewer than outside researchers have found.
WASHINGTON — A key senator investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election sharply criticized Twitter on Thursday for failing to aggressively investigate the Russian misuse of its platform after the company said it had largely limited its own inquiry to accounts linked to fraudulent profiles already identified by Facebook.
The senator, Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called Twitter’s briefing for congressional investigators “very disappointing,” and accused company officials of ignoring extensive evidence of fraudulent Russian activity.
The company’s presentation “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,” Mr. Warner said, adding, “Their response was frankly inadequate on every level.”
After a closed-door briefing for the Senate and House intelligence committees, Twitter said that it had found about 200 accounts that appeared to be linked to the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election — a small fraction of the number found by outside researchers. It said it identified the accounts by looking for links to 470 fraudulent Facebook profiles and pages that had already been identified by Facebook investigators.
The creators of the Facebook pages posed as American activists to spread fake news and sow discord during the election season.
Twitter identified only 22 accounts on its platform that were directly tied to the Russian Facebook pages and then discovered another 179 accounts that were “related or linked” to the Facebook accounts. None were registered on the site as advertisers, the company said.
The Twitter statement, issued on its blog, did not address extensive research by outside experts that has identified far more suspected Russian activity during and since the election.
The cybersecurity company FireEye found hundreds of automated accounts linked to Russian hacking groups, which sent out messages critical of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats last year.
Nor did Twitter address a web “dashboard” set up last month by researchers to track and compile statistics on 600 Twitter accounts the researchers believe to be linked to the Russian government or to have a longstanding pattern of repeating its propaganda. The statement said nothing about still-functioning Twitter accounts of DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, which American intelligence officials identified last year as created by Russian agents to distribute emails and documents obtained by hacking.
Mr. Warner said he was “more than a bit surprised in light of all of the public interest in this subject over the last few weeks that anyone from the Twitter team would think that the presentation they made to Senate staff today even began to answer the kinds of questions that we’d asked.”
He said the company had much more work to do.
“This raises at an even greater level the necessity that the American public has the ability to know when they are seeing a political ad, who’s behind it — particularly if it is being sponsored by foreign agents,” he said.
Twitter did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the criticism.
