Hillary Clinton’s account got less than 50,000 retweets by the Russian-linked automated accounts during the same period of time, the company said in documents posted Friday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The automated programs, or bots, retweeted the Republican candidate’s @realDonaldTrump posts almost 470,000 times, accounting for a little more than 4 percent of the retweets he received from Sept. 1 to Nov. 15, 2016.

NEW YORK — Russian-linked automated Twitter accounts shared Donald Trump’s tweets almost half a million times during the final months of the 2016 election, Twitter said in a submission to Congress.

The information further underscores how Russian-linked accounts sought to stir up discord during the presidential election.


In a separate development Monday, the Trump administration decided not to punish anybody for now under new sanctions retaliating for Russia’s election-meddling, the State Department said, in a surprising move that fueled further questions about whether Trump is too soft on Moscow.

The government had until Monday to take two steps under a law passed by Congress last year in the wake of the 2016 presidential campaign. The first required the United States to slap sanctions on anyone doing ‘‘significant’’ business with people linked to Russia’s defense and intelligence agencies, using a blacklist released in October. The second required the administration to publish a list of Russian ‘‘political figures and oligarchs’’ who have grown rich under President Vladimir Putin.

On the first item, the administration decided it didn’t need to penalize anyone, even though several countries have had multibillion-dollar arms deals with Russia in the works. State Department officials said the threat of sanctions had been deterrent enough.

‘‘We estimate that foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions,’’ said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert. She did not cite any examples.


On the second item — the ‘‘Putin list’’ — the day came and went with no sign of if or when it would be released. The Treasury Department did not respond to several inquiries. In the past, the administration has breezed past several such deadlines, including the October deadline to produce a blacklist, only to follow through later after pressure from Congress mounted.

The Russian government said the US sanctions were an attempt to influence Russia’s March presidential election.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said the sanctions were a “direct and obvious attempt to influence the elections” on March 18. However, he added that he was sure any action would not affect the vote.

US investigators have accused Russia of meddling in the presidential elections. Kremlin representatives and the Trump administration have repeatedly denied the allegations. Last year, Trump approved a law calling for new sanctions on Russia but he accused Congress of overreaching and preventing him from easing penalties on Russia in the future.

In its investigation into Russian election meddling, Congress has been looking into how social-media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube were used during the US election.

The documents are Twitter’s response to follow-up questions from the Senate committee after an Oct. 31 hearing on the issue of Russian infiltration of the media platforms.

Twitter also found that Russian-linked accounts were responsible for almost 200,000 retweets of WikiLeaks’ Twitter account during the same time period. During the campaign, WikiLeaks published e-mails from Democratic party servers.


In this further assessment, Twitter said it identified about 2.12 million automated, election-related tweets from Russian-linked accounts that collectively received about 455 million impressions within the first seven days of posting.

This is significantly higher than the number of impressions Twitter had previously reported to investigators.

Twitter also said accounts linked to the Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency exhibited nonautomated patterns of activity, such as trying to reach out to journalists and “prominent individuals” through mentions.

Some of those accounts represented themselves as news outlets, members of activist organizations, or politically engaged Americans, it said.

Bloomberg News has previously reported that the IRA operated dozens of Twitter accounts masquerading as local American news sources that collectively garnered more than half-a-million followers.

More than 100 news outlets also published stories containing those handles in the run-up to the election, and some of them were even tweeted by a top presidential aide.

“Some of the accounts appear to have attempted to organize rallies and demonstrations, and several engaged in abusive behavior and harassment,” Twitter said.

The new disclosures from Twitter demonstrate how Russian meddlers are complementing their networks of bots with human activity, which the company said makes it harder for Twitter’s algorithms to detect the difference.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.