Russian-linked Twitter bots shared Donald Trump's tweets almost half a million times during the final months of the 2016 election, Twitter Inc. said in a submission to Congress.
The automated accounts retweeted the Republican candidate's @realDonaldTrump posts almost 470,000 times, accounting for just more than 4 percent of the retweets he received from Sept. 1 to Nov. 15, 2016. Hillary Clinton's account got less than 50,000 retweets by the Russian-linked automated accounts during the same period of time, the company said in documents posted Friday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The information further underscores how Russian-linked accounts sought to stir up discord during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Congress has been investigating exactly how social-media platforms like Twitter, Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube were manipulated during the election. The documents are Twitter's response to follow-up questions from the Senate committee following an Oct. 31 hearing on the issue of Russian infiltration of the media platforms.