Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic Party members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a joint letter to the executives of Facebook and Twitter yesterday urging them to further delve into ongoing Russian influence campaigns on their platforms around the "ReleaseTheMemo" hashtag. The hashtag references a memo written by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes detailing alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the FBI. WikiLeaks' Julian Assange offered on Twitter to pay anyone who leaked the memo to him.

According to a social media tracking project by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy , a significant part of the support on social media for declassification of Nunes' memo has come from accounts controlled by Russia-backed "troll" accounts—some of them automated "bots" that promote other posts for propaganda purposes.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy, the organization behind the social media tracking site Hamilton 68, reported last Friday that real-time data showed that #ReleaseTheMemo was largely being used by accounts identified as controlled by Russian influence campaigns.

"As of right now, #ReleaseTheMemo has been used over 3,000 times (and five other related hashtags are in the top 10)," German Marshall Fund communications Coordinator Bret Schafer said in an email to press last Friday. "In total, they've easily shared more than 4,500 hashtags on the topic in the past two days, and our top URL is Assange's offer to pay for a copy of the memo. That certainly seems to be a sign of a coordinated effort by the bots and trolls."

Whether and how many accounts linked to Russian influence operations are involved in this campaign The frequency and volume of their postings on this topic How many legitimate Twitter and Facebook account holders have been exposed to this campaign

Hamilton 68's tracking of Russian "bots" and trolls has been controversial, especially among supporters of President Donald Trump. Feinstein (who is also a member of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee) and Schiff have asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for their companies' "urgent assistance" in verifying the report, requesting that the companies conduct an "in-depth forensic examination of this real-time activity" and produce a report to Congress and the public by January 26. The specific questions Schiff and Feinstein want answered:

"These recent Russian efforts are intended to influence congressional action and undermine Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation," Schiff and Feinstein wrote."It is critically important that the Special Counsel’s investigation be allowed to proceed without interference from inside or outside the United States. If these reports are accurate, we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process."