A small number of the accounts identified as part of Facebook’s investigation into Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election also used the company’s Messenger product to interact with users, admitted Facebook’s VP of messaging products David Marcus during his appearance at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.D Live conference in Laguna Beach, Calif. Wednesday. (Variety)
Marcus cautioned the company was still determining, alongside federal investigators, how Russia-linked accounts may have tried to influence the U.S. political discourse last year. But he said inquiries “at this stage” showed that these accounts were not prolifically using his product. (Recode)
Also Wednesday, BuzzFeed News reported Twitter took 11 months to close a Russian troll account that claimed to speak for the Tennessee Republican Party even after that state’s real GOP notified the social media company the account was a fake. The account, @TEN_GOP, was enormously popular, amassing at least 136,000 followers between its creation in November 2015 and when Twitter shut it down in August, according to a snapshot of the account captured by the Internet Archive just before it was “permanently suspended.” (BuzzFeed)
The discovery of the now-unavailable tweets presents the first evidence that several members of the Trump campaign pushed covert Russian propaganda on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election. Two days before election day, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted a post by @TEN_GOP regarding Hillary Clinton’s email. Three weeks before the election, Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital director, retweeted a separate post from @TEN_GOP. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted the account three times, including an allegation of voter fraud in Florida one week before the election. (The Daily Beast)