Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the No. 2 Senate Republican, posted an email he received from Twitter on Saturday indicating that he interacted with content from Russian-linked Twitter accounts that attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election.
“As part of our recent work to understand Russian-linked activities on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency,” read the email.
“Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing you because we have reason to believe that you either followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked content from these accounts during the election period,” the email continued. “This is purely for your own information purposes, and is not related to a security concern for your account.”
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Cornyn shared a screenshot of the email with his followers on Saturday.
“Finally social media is waking up to manipulation of public opinion by our adversaries,” he wrote. “All of us need to step up to meet this challenge, especially the Press.”
Twitter announced on Friday that it suspended 1,062 new accounts it found to be linked to the Internet Research Agency.
In total, the company has found 3,814 Internet Research Agency-linked accounts, which posted 175,993 tweets during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The social media company also announced that it would contact 677,775 users to inform them that they liked, retweeted or followed Russian-linked accounts following a request from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
Twitter said, however, that it would not inform users of the exact content they saw and interacted with because it has “already suspended these accounts” and “the relevant content on Twitter is no longer publicly available.”