Senate investigators want answers from Reddit and Tumblr on Russia meddling
Source: Washington Post
By Tony Romm March 5 at 5:57 PM
Congressional investigators probing Russian interference around the 2016 U.S. presidential election plan to question Reddit and Tumblr over new reports that the Kremlin may have helped spread disinformation on their sites, as lawmakers continue to explore the ways in which Russia weaponized social media.
Staffers for lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a briefing with Tumblr soon, and they’re seeking more information from Reddit after it acknowledged Monday it shuttered hundreds of suspicious accounts in 2015 and 2016, according to a person close to the panel who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Triggering the Senate’s new interest is a trove of documents first reported by the Daily Beast last week. It found at least 21 accounts on Tumblr had ties to the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin troll farm that was the focus of an indictment last month by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Meanwhile, the research agency’s content flourished on Reddit topic pages, called subreddits, related to then-candidate Donald Trump and Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton.
On Monday, Reddit offered additional detail: The company’s chief executive, Steve Huffman, revealed in a post on the site that his team had “found and removed a few hundred accounts.” He added that the “vast majority of suspicious accounts we have found in the past months were banned back in 2015-2016 through our enhanced efforts to prevent abuse of the site generally.”
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/05/senate-investigators-want-answers-from-reddit-and-tumblr-on-russia-meddling/
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That is pretty good!
