Twitter has a much smaller user base than Facebook, but its ability to inject information into the U.S. media ecosystem has become a focus of investigators. | Getty Twitter a growing focus of Senate Russia probe Of particular interest is the prominence of bots on Twitter, and what role they may have played in making misleading campaign season tweets go viral.

The Senate's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is about to turn its sights on Twitter.

The company has agreed to meet with the Intelligence Committee’s staff investigators in Washington next week, the company confirmed. The briefing is expected to take place on Wednesday, Sept. 27. Twitter will discuss the role its platform played in the distribution of Russian misinformation during the presidential campaign, according to a source close to the investigation.


While Facebook — and its giant user base — has garnered much of the early attention in the Senate's investigation, Twitter is also emerging as an area of interest. Twitter has a much smaller user base than Facebook, but its ability to inject information into the U.S. media ecosystem has become a focus of investigators.

Of particular interest is the prominence of bots — or automated accounts used to post and amplify information — on Twitter, and what role they may have played in making misleading campaign season tweets go viral, according to the source. Investigators are also looking at how stories and memes distributed by Russian actors on Twitter found their way onto U.S. news sites, particularly conservative-leaning outlets.

In addition, investigators are exploring whether the popularity of Russian-linked posts promoting "fake news" stories boosted those stories' ranking in Google search results. They are also probing whether Russians might have used Twitter to quietly pass along damaging information to collaborators — similar to the way the site has been used by political action committees to share information with political campaigns with which they’re legally prohibited from coordinating.

A Twitter spokesperson said in a statement late Wednesday that the company is "cooperating" with the Senate investigation, adding, "Twitter deeply respects the integrity of the election process, a cornerstone of all democracies, and will continue to strengthen our platform against bots and other forms of manipulation that violate our Terms of Service.”

Both Facebook and Twitter are also expected to be invited to an open committee hearing Senate investigators are planning, though no date has been set. The committee normally holds open hearings on Wednesdays, and longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen is already set to appear before the panel on Oct. 25.

According to some current and former national security officials, Russian influence on Twitter is much more difficult to trace because at issue are tweets rather than business transactions, as was the case with Facebook ad purchases.

"Twitter is a big area of concern here, and they and other platforms that are emerging need to figure out a way to prevent the manipulation of their platform,” said one former senior U.S. cybersecurity official, who recently left for the private sector. Twitter, said the official, is so “uncontrolled, unregulated” that it has become an easy target for people seeking clandestine influence on a broad scale.

Facebook attracted early attention in the Senate investigation both because of its size — 2 billion monthly active users worldwide compared with Twitter’s 328 million — and because its intimate structure, where users generally befriend people they know offline, is seen as a particular threat to the trust relationships between Americans. In the case of Twitter, users often follow people they do not know and who might be posting under pseudonyms.

One line of investigation the committee is pursuing with Facebook: whether ads planted by Russian actors were used to push users to pages promoting offline events, such as pro-Trump rallies, the source close to the investigation said.

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, who now leads the publishing platform Medium, recently said that the challenge of nefarious information being widely disseminated by bad actors only really came to the attention of social media companies like Twitter and Facebook in the last year.

That said, said Williams, “the thing that we should acknowledge is that these ad-driven platforms are benefiting from the fake information, misinformation, these campaigns — from people generating attention at pretty much any cost.”