Twitter Is Crawling With Bots and Lacks Incentive to Expel Them

Twitter is scrambling to explain how bots controlled by Russian meddlers may have been used to impact the 2016 president election, according to Bloomberg.

Investigators hoping to mine Twitter data to figure out who was behind the operation are probably out of luck because the company deleted tweets and other user data, Politico reported, citing unnamed current and former government cybersecurity officials. The news site said federal investigators now believe Twitter was one of Russia’s most potent weapons in its efforts to tip the election to Donald Trump.

Twitter’s privacy policies generally dictate that when a user revises or deletes tweets, paid promotions or entire accounts, the company must do so, too.  That data is now almost certainly irretrievably lost, Politico reported. Twitter was designed to be friendly to bots. They can help advertisers quickly spread their messages and respond to customer service complaints.

After the election, there was little discussion inside the company about whether the platform may have been misused, according to people familiar with the matter. But the ubiquity and usefulness of bots did come up. At one point, there were talks about whether Twitter should put a marking on bot accounts, so that users would know they were automated. Yet most of the conversation after the election focused on whether Trump’s tweets violated Twitter’s policies.

The company said it has made a plethora of recent changes, including creating automated processes to detect suspicious logins and stop bad content at its source. Yet experts say that Twitter still lags far behind Facebook and Google. Twitter executives have been in frequent contact with Congressional committees and investigators to try to answer their questions before hearings on Nov. 1. The company is addressing the issue from multiple angles, including asking engineers to examine spam use on the platform and asking its business teams to delve into advertising purchases by the Russian TV network RT.