UPDATED 23:11 EST / DECEMBER 14 2017

APPS

Twitter’s response to Russian Brexit meddling is ‘totally inadequate,’ says British MP

The British MP who began an investigation into Russian interference during the EU referendum Thursday called Twitter Inc.’s response to provide the U.K. government with information “totally inadequate.”

In November, the U.K.’s head of digital, culture, media and sport committee, Damian Collins, asked Twitter and Facebook Inc. to help with a “Fake News Inquiry” regarding a possible Russian disinformation campaign. Both social media platforms agreed to hand over information.

On Wednesday Twitter submitted its finding, which revealed that only six tweets had come from Russia as paid advertisements during the Brexit campaign. These were paid for by news media organization Russia Today, with a total cost of a little more than $1,000. According to Collins, Twitter’s submission was less than substantive.

“It seems odd that so far we have received more information about activities that have taken place on your platform from journalists and academics than from you,” Collins said in a letter to Twitter. “If Twitter is serious about cooperating with the work of this committee and tackling the spread of disinformation then you should provide me with a full response to the clear questions that I set.”

The lambasting of Twitter comes hot on the heels of a similar criticism aimed at Facebook and its chief executive. The company submitted information to the inquiry that stated Russia’s infamous Internet Research Agency had spent a meager $1 on ads during the referendum. Collins said the submission “does not answer the questions that I put to Mark Zuckerberg.”

Facebook told the inquiry that it had determined that the IRA’s dollar spending had led to just 200 people in the U.K. seeing the ads during May 2016. This seemed to have rankled Collins, who accused Facebook of not doing enough.

“Facebook conducted its own research to identify tens of thousands of fake pages and accounts that were active during the French presidential election,” Collins said. “They should do the same looking back at the EU referendum and not just rely on external sources referring evidence of suspicious activity back to them.”

The amount of information provided to the inquiry does seem scant when compared with a similar investigation that found that millions of Americans had been served Russian propaganda during the elections.

In terms of Twitter alone, research by City University in London found that 13,500 accounts were extremely active during the referendum. Some 65,000 messages were posted in a four-week period, and then the accounts were deleted. Collins has now given Twitter another deadline, this time the middle of January.

Image: Esther Vargas via Flickr

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