Twitter Sends Users Creepy ‘Big Brother’ Email Regarding Secret ‘Russian Influence’ Online
Original Article | Author: Cristina Laila
On Friday, Twitter sent out an email to Twitter users regarding the so-called ‘Russian influence campaigns’ that took place on the social media platform during the 2016 presidential election.
The subject line of the email from Twitter read, “Information Regarding Russian Influence Campaigns on Twitter”.
The Gateway Pundit’s Associate Editor Cristina Laila received this email from Twitter on Friday.
The email informed users that Twitter is actively working to understand ‘Russian-linked activities’ on the platform that took place during the 2016 presidential election. Twitter claims they have identified and suspended a ‘number of accounts that were potentially connected to propaganda efforts by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency’.
Here’s where the email turns creepy Big Brother…
Twitter users received this email because Twitter believes they either ‘followed, re-tweeted or liked’ content from one of these so-called Russian propaganda Twitter accounts.
Twitter went on to say there is no security concerns with the user accounts who receive these emails.
The social media giant also linked to a blog where people can view content from the suspended accounts.
According to Twitter’s blog post, they sent this email to 677,775 people in the United States:
Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period. Because we have already suspended these accounts, the relevant content on Twitter is no longer publicly available.
In total, during the time period we investigated, the 3,814 identified IRA-linked accounts posted 175,993 Tweets, approximately 8.4% of which were election-related.
Twitter closed the email by saying they are actively working to stop malicious accounts and tweets from spreading and are committed to being transparent.
Editor's Note: NMWD received the aforementioned email from Twitter this morning. It said the following:
Dear News Media Watchdog, As part of our recent work to understand Russian-linked activities on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency. Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing you because we have reason to believe that you either followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked content from these accounts during the election period. This is purely for your own information purposes, and is not related to a security concern for your account. We are sharing this information so that you can learn more about these accounts and the nature of the Russian propaganda effort. You can see examples of content from these suspended accounts on our blog if you're interested. People look to Twitter for useful, timely, and appropriate information. We are taking active steps to stop malicious accounts and Tweets from spreading, and we are determined to keep ahead of the tactics of bad actors. For example, in recent months we have developed new techniques to identify accounts manipulating our platform, have improved our process for challenging suspicious accounts, and have introduced new measures designed to identify and take action on coordinated malicious activity. In 2018, we are building on these improvements. Our blog also contains more information about these efforts. People come to Twitter to see what's happening in the world. We are committed to making it the best place to do that and to being transparent with the people who use and trust our platform. Twitter
