Russian bots retweeted Trump 10 times more than Hillary before US election

Twitter said at least 50,000 Russia-linked bots retweeted Donald Trump 10 times more than they retweeted Hillary Clinton

Twitter has made a startling revelation in connection with Russia's alleged involvement in 2016 United States Presidential election.

The social-networking firm said at least 50,000 Russia-linked automated Twitter accounts, or bots, retweeted then-candidate Donald Trump 10 times more than they retweeted his rival Hillary Clinton during the final leg of the campaigning.

According to cnn.com, the company told the Senate Judiciary Committee that it had traced 50,000 automated Twitter accounts to Russia and they had sent more than 2 million election-related tweets between September 1 and November 15, 2016.

These 50,000 accounts are in addition to 3,814 accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian government-linked troll group.

However, the firm, in its written statement, also said the same accounts represented "a very small fraction of overall activity" and the 2.1 million tweets sent by the bots represented only 1% of election-related tweets on its platform.

It is pertinent to note here that the Twitter has not been able to identify all the accounts created on its platform yet, since 12% of them hide their location using virtual private networks.