Important parts of the digital imprint left by Russian operatives who used the platforms of Facebook and Twitter have been lost, in some cases, irretrievably, according to U.S. investigators and researchers.
In the case of Twitter, it's partly because the company's pro-consumer policies generally require it to delete and edit tweets or even entirely remove accounts in accordance with what a user does. The lost information is hindering investigators' ability to recreate an image of the Twitter ecosystem that would illuminate when and how Russia's influence operations began on the platform. Politico writes:
Many U.S. investigators believe that their best hope for identifying who was behind these operations, how they collaborated with each other and their suspected links to the Kremlin lies buried within the mountains of data accumulated in recent years by Twitter. [...]
Thomas Rid, a Strategic Studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, blamed Twitter for making it easy for Russia and other bad actors to hijack its platform by failing to crack down on suspicious activity, and by then allowing them to cover their tracks simply by hitting the delete key.
“Should bot operators and people who spread hate and abuse have the right to remove content from the public domain? Twitter says yes, and I think it’s a scandal,” said Rid, an expert witness on Russian disinformation campaigns for the Senate intelligence committee’s Russia investigation. “It removes forensic evidence from the public domain, and makes the work of investigators more difficult and maybe impossible.”
Meanwhile, Facebook is retroactively and intentionally making it more difficult for investigators and researchers to analyze user data.
The Washington Post reports:
Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research last week showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that — and maybe much more — if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well.
Albright welcomed the chat with three company officials. But he was not pleased to discover that they had done more than talk about their concerns regarding his research. They also had scrubbed from the Internet nearly everything — thousands of Facebook posts and the related data — that had made the work possible. [...]
But the deletion of the posts and the related data struck Albright as a major loss for the world’s understanding of the Russian campaign. He still has the data and the posts for the six pages he examined, but as others become public, there will be no way for independent researchers or journalists to conduct a similar examination of any of the other 470 pages and accounts — or any others linked to Russia that may emerge over subsequent weeks or months.
Facebook says it was simply scrubbing the data to honor its privacy policies. According to a company official, they fixed a "bug" that allowed researchers to analyze data they shouldn't have had access to.
Thanks for nothing, Facebook.