Twitter Revises Data on Russian Trolls and Their 2017 Activity

Social-media company says 228 accounts were ‘misidentified’
Changes invalidate key points of previous Bloomberg article

The Twitter Inc. logo is displayed on the facade of the company's headquarters in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2013. Twitter Inc. surged 85 percent in its trading debut, as investors paid a premium for its promises of fast growth.Photographer: David Paul Morris

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By Ben Elgin

February 20, 2019 at 7:29 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

Twitter Inc. this month made a significant revision to its public database of more than 3,000 accounts that it has linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, fundamentally altering the record about the group’s trolling efforts in the U.S. in the year following the contentious 2016 presidential election.

Twitter’s changes invalidate central portions of a Bloomberg News article published last August that had analyzed the Russian troll farm’s activity in 2017, according to researchers at Clemson University who have compiled and published a database of the IRA’s Twitter activity.