Twitter recently suspended two dozen accounts and investigated many more for their links to Russian interests which may have influenced the 2016 presidential election. Unfortunately, as the Associated Press reports, that wasn't enough for Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, who believes Twitter isn't taking their investigation seriously enough, saying that he was "deeply disappointed" in the suspensions.
This of course follows on Facebook's involvement with the same investigation, and they, themselves, have gone on to detail what they're doing to comply. Twitter, on the other hand, has stayed mostly mum until now, aside from agreeing to cooperate earlier this year. This fact did not escape Senator Warner, who, according to CNet, said, "The presentation that the Twitter team made to the Senate Intel staff today was deeply disappointing. The notion that their work was basically derivative, based upon accounts that Facebook had identified, showed [an] enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions, and again begs many more questions than they offered."
In Twitter's blog post regarding their findings, they do indeed describe working off of Facebook's findings. They write, "Of the roughly 450 accounts that Facebook recently shared as a part of their review, we concluded that 22 had corresponding accounts on Twitter. All of those identified accounts had already been or immediately were suspended from Twitter for breaking our rules, most for violating our prohibitions against spam." To be fair, they do take it one degree further, digging into "an additional 179 related or linked accounts, and took action on the ones we found in violation of our rules." But beyond that, Twitter only wrote that they will "continue to investigate these issues, and will take action on anything that violates our Terms of Service." They are also very careful to mention that none of the accounts in question were registered as advertisers with Twitter.
Arguably, the company's inability to provide more details on the 22 Russian accounts may not be because of a lack of effort. By the platform's very nature, people aren't asked to share too much of their personal information. This is especially apparent when comparing it with Facebook, which asks loads of questions upon creating an account, and guards against one person having multiple accounts.
California Representative Adam Schiff understands this difference. According to KQED, Rep. Schiff thought the presentation from Twitter was "good but preliminary." He went on to say, "I think there are challenges to Twitter in its forensic investigation because Twitter users don’t provide the same background information that Facebook users do. At the same time I don’t think we’ve more than scratched the surface in terms of our understanding of how the Russians may have used that platform."
Related: Twitter Says Trump's North Korea Threat Tweet Is 'Newsworthy,' Not A Violation