Georgia Wells

The US indictment handed up against three Russian companies and 13 individuals shows starkly how ill-prepared the tech giants were for the type of aggressive influence campaign the Russians allegedly mounted. The details also suggest it won’t be easy to stop such tactics in the run-up to the midterm election in less than nine months, say researchers who study social media. Facebook, Google parent Alphabet, and Twitter have more than 100,000 employees and $150 billion in annual revenue combined.

Facebook, Google and Twitter are set to divulge new details showing that the scope of Russian-backed manipulation on their platforms before and after the US presidential election was far greater than previously disclosed, reaching an estimated 126 million people on Facebook alone, according to people familiar with the matter, prepared copies of their testimonies and a company statement. Facebook estimates that 470 Russian-backed accounts connected to a single pro-Kremlin firm, the Internet Research Agency, churned out 80,000 posts on Facebook between January 2015 and August 2017, the social