Facebook and Twitter say they haven’t seen evidence that Russian-linked accounts used “voter data” in ad targeting

One of the biggest questions about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government was just discussed at today’s high-drama Senate Intelligence Committee hearing with executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google. One of the key issues is whether the campaign shared its audience targeting data, specifically on registered voters, with the Russian-linked accounts.

Sen. Marco Rubio asked Facebook and Twitter if they noticed that the suspicious accounts had used “registered voter data” to customize its ad targeting. Such targeting would have helped weaponize the Trump campaign’s highly-valued voter data, allowing them for example to go after African-American supporters of Hillary Clinton in a specific state with some misleading posts that would discourage them from voting for her.

“We haven’t seen evidence of that so far,” Twitter’s acting general counsel Sean Edgett replied. And Facebook’s general counsel Colin Stretch offered the same answer.