Senator to Twitter: Help Us Fend Off Russian Spambots
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A top Democrat on the homeland security committee today wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Legions of Russian Twitter bots could be undermining the presidential election, and one congressman is asking the social media platform's top executive for help.
Citing reports that Russian state actors are behind "'social' cyberattacks"—using several fake Twitter accounts to proliferate the same pro-Russian messages—Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., asked chief executive Jack Dorsey to explain how the social media platform is cracking down on such campaigns.
Carper's letter, published Thursday, comes after other reports that Russian state actors infiltrated a Democratic National Committee database, among other targets. The FBI last month issued an alert possibly linking attacks on state election's voter databases to foreign state actors.
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The senator, a top Democrat on the House Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asked for Dorsey's help "identifying the nature and extent" of malicious operations on its platform, and to take steps to "protect our democracy from these potential threats."
Specifically, Carper asked Twitter to explain how it tracks false and spam accounts, whether the company can track spam accounts controlled by Russian state actors, and whether using bots to spread this kind of messaging is prohibited by Twitter's terms of service. If it is, Carper wants to know what steps Twitter is taking to cut the number of bots on its site.
Twitter has reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that less than 16 million users, roughly 5 percent of all users, are spam accounts, though the actual number may be higher.
The social media giant has clashed with the federal government recently; in the spring, Twitter said intelligence agencies weren't authorized to use its analytics service Dataminr for internal purposes. Still, it has suspended hundreds of thousands of accounts for threatening and promoting ISIS-related activity; Facebook also appeared to be hiring an employee, based in its D.C. office, to investigate how hate groups use social media platforms to recruit members and spread propaganda.