Recode Daily: Twitter takes its turn being grilled on Capitol Hill about Russian meddling

Yesterday, it was Twitter’s turn to soak up Capitol Hill criticism about its role in the 2016 presidential election. According to a new study by researchers at Oxford, Twitter was flooded with “junk news” and conspiratorial misinformation during a 10-day period around the election. Twitter told congressional investigators that it has found about 200 accounts believed to be tied to some of the same Russia-linked sources that bought ads on Facebook. After the briefing, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner called Twitter’s explanation “frankly inadequate” and “deeply disappointing.” Stay up to date with this ongoing story with our continually updated storystream. [Tony Romm and Rani Molla / Recode]

Ikea has acquired TaskRabbit, and will run the startup as an independent subsidiary, with CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot and her staff staying on. The Swedish home-goods giant, which has 48 U.S. stores and 389 worldwide, was looking for some digital help from the on-demand contract-labor marketplace, which has 60,000 independent workers on its platform. Now you’re guaranteed to know someone who can put together your Flürgenshnørgen bookcase. [Kara Swisher and Theodore Schleifer / Recode]

AT&T and other broadband providers asked the Supreme Court to overturn Obama-era net neutrality rules barring ISPs from slowing or blocking rivals’ content. Now under Republican leadership, the FCC is already considering a plan to replace and weaken the rules that defenders say are needed to enforce fair treatment of web traffic. [Bloomberg]

This summer’s media industry buzzword “pivot to video” is already being proclaimed dead — Digiday called the strategy a "pivot to declining pageviews." As an example, Mic’s website audience is tanking by millions of readers a month — plummeting from 17.5 million visitors in August 2016 to 6.6 million visitors in August 2017 — after laying off most of its writers in a bid to produce more video for platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. [Heidi N. Moore / Columbia Journalism Review]

Here’s a quick primer on the history of media measurement. If you’ve ever wondered why digital media analytics are dominated by measures of volume —  pageviews, clicks and their many cousins —  you have to dig back decades before the dawn of the internet to the radio broadcasters of the Great Depression. [Brent Merritt / Medium]

Recode Presents ...

Do you have questions about the Equifax hack? Kara Swisher and Lauren Goode will be talking to security researcher Brian Krebs on an upcoming episode of the Too Embarrassed to Ask podcast, so tweet your questions with the hashtag #TooEmbarrassed or email them to TooEmbarrassed@recode.net.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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