Facebook, Twitter to share details of Russia's meddling during Brexit vote

Russian accounts on Twitter which mentioned #Brexit and posted nearly 45,000 messages related to Brexit in the 48 hours around the vote

IANS  |  London 

Brexit
UN and Union flags fly above Parliament Square in London.

and have agreed to share details with British authorities on Russia's interference in the referendum by using their platforms.

According to the Guardian on Wednesday, and will share those posts with the House of Commons media watchdog.

"said it would respond with information by early December, while said it intends to share findings in the coming weeks," the report added.

The information would give the UK a better idea of whether tried to influence the vote on leaving the EU, Damian Collins, Chair of Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Committee was quoted as saying.

Earlier in November, a group of data scientists found 156,252 Russian accounts on which mentioned #and posted nearly 45,000 messages related to the EU referendum in the 48 hours around the vote.

In the US, Facebook, and Google are already facing intense fake news scrutiny after disclosing the details about the presence of Russian political ads, tweets and posts on their platforms during the presidential election in 2016.

The Kremlin-linked Russian organisations purchased more than $100,000 of ads on social media platforms during the 2016 US presidential election.

told US Congress in November that 126 million of its users in the US might have seen ads produced and circulated by Russian operatives.

According to UK Policy Director Simon Miller, it is "considering how we can best respond to the Electoral Commission's request for information and expect to be able to respond to them by the second week of December."

British Prime Minister has also accused of meddling in the elections and planting fake stories.

According to data scientists from Swansea University in Wales and the University of California, Berkeley, over 150,000 Russian accounts who were posting about the Ukrainian conflict swiftly started tweeting about in days leading up to the 2016 vote.

"From posting fewer than 1,000 tweets a day before June 13, the accounts -- many of which are virulently pro-Putin -- posted 39,000 tweets on June 23-24," the report said.

Tho Pham, one of the report authors, confirmed to TechCrunch that the majority of those tweets were posted on June 24, 2016, the day after the vote.

Political events like the referendum and the US presidential election have observed the use of social bots in spreading fake news and misinformation, the data scientists observed.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

First Published: Wed, November 29 2017. 11:51 IST