Twitter continues its deep dive into the ways Russia-backed tweets spread through the platform during the 2016 election—while posing as real people or organizations.
And it quietly posted a note on its blog that the problem was even bigger than it had previously revealed.
It also shared new examples of bogus tweets linked to Russia's Internet Research Agency, or IRA, from the week prior to the 2016 presidential election.
The company is now reaching out directly to those who unknowingly helped spread the fake tweets: "Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period," the company said over the weekend.
And the number of Russian-linked accounts keeps growing as the investigation continues:
"... we have identified 13,512 additional accounts, for a total of 50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content during the election period," the company said.
It has now turned over the "Twitter handles" being used by these accounts to Congress.