Testimony of Sean J. Edgett Acting General Counsel, Twitter, Inc.

Twitter Admits It Buried "Podesta Email", DNC Tweets Ahead Of The Presidential Election...

Testimony of Sean J. Edgett Acting General Counsel, Twitter, Inc.
Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. These steps were part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas.
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https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-d433-4055-9f3d-c94f97eeb1c0/testimony-of-sean-edgett-acting-general-counsel-twitter.pdf

"We took a similarly expansive approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account.
Because there is no single characteristic that reliably determines geographic origin or affiliation, we relied on a number of criteria, including whether the account was created in Russia, whether the user registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email address, whether the user’s display name contains Cyrillic characters, whether the user frequently Tweets in Russian, and whether the user has logged in from any Russian IP address, even a single time. We considered an account to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria."

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Ben Norton
✔@BenjaminNorton
In other words, when Twitter says "Russian-linked" account, it means nothing. They could just be *gasps* Russian!
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Testimony of Sean J. Edgett - Acting General Counsel, Twitter, Inc. October 31, 2017 - Appendix 1 & 2