WHOOPS

Report: Twitter Erased Data Potentially Crucial to Russia Probes

Site’s privacy policy caused deletions of info that may have been valuable to investigators.

Twitter, which may have been one of Russia’s most effective weapons in its efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, erased user data and posts that would have been valuable to investigators probing the interference, Politico reports. Cybersecurity officials said the site’s strict privacy policy may have led to deletions of the information, which would’ve helped track the leagues of automated bots, phony ad campaigns, and other information that promoted pro-Trump and anti-Clinton narratives online. “If you have access to all this, you can basically see when botnets appeared and disappeared, and how they shaped narrative around certain events,” one analyst told Politico.