Twitter has deleted tweets and other user data that could have potentially shed more light on the role Russia played in the 2016 U.S. election.
Russia’s primary platform for promoting then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was Twitter, as they created automated bots, fake users, catchy hashtags and bogus ad campaigns to push their pro-Trump agenda.
This sort of data is valuable because it allows investigators to trace Russian involvement to specific dates, which further reveals how they constructed the narrative around certain events. Although Twitter engineers are attempting to retrieve the substantial amount of potentially crucial information, prospects for recovery seem bleak.
A few weeks ago, Facebook also found itself in the midsts of the investigation when they disclosed the content of nearly 3,000 Russian-linked ads to Congress. Proactively, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined the measures his company will be taking to reduce foreign meddling in the future.
Aside from social media platforms, Russia reportedly attempted to use Pokémon Go as a political weapon by promoting a contest through a Tumblr page, linked to Russia’s now-notorious Internet Research Agency, encouraging Black Lives Matter sympathizers to play the game near sites known for police brutality.
Russian involvement in the election has, in just a short period of time, proved to be far more consequential than people may have expected. With every piece of evidence that is being surfaced, America becomes closer to the fair and free elections that are intended by its democracy, despite the lack of integrity coming from the man in the White House.
