Thomson Reuters
Russia's President Putin addresses the media in Sochi
In a portion of the prepared testimony, which was obtained by Business Insider on Monday, Twitter's acting general counsel Sean Edgett wrote that the company began its review "with a universe of over 16 billion tweets - the total volume of original tweets on our platform during the relevant period."
"Applying the methodology described above, and using detection tools we currently have in place, we identified 36,746 accounts that generated automated, election-related content and had at least one of the characteristics we used to associate an account with Russia," the testimony continued.
"During the relevant period, those accounts generated approximately 1.4 million automated, election-related Tweets, which collectively received approximately 288 million impressions," it said.
A Twitter spokesperson didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
By comparison, Facebook will tell Congress that Russia-linked accounts produced approximately 80,000 posts on the platform between 2015-2017 that were seen by about 126 million Americans.
"We estimate that roughly 29 million people were served content in their
The IRA, or the Internet Research Agency, is a Russian "troll factory" that mass-produced disinformation and propaganda on social media during the election.
"Posts from these pages were also shared, liked and followed by people on Facebook, and, as a result, three times more people may have been been exposed to a story that originated from the Russian operation," Stretch will tell Congress.
He will add: "Our best estimate is that approximately 126 million people may have been served one of their stories at some point during the two-year period. This equals about four-thousandths of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content."