There is nothing concerning about a President directing the law enforcement to look into a former political opponent. Nothing authoritarian about that all.
Not really news but:
Former Twitter Employee Says Fake Russian Accounts Were Not Taken Seriously
In 2015, a manager discovered a trove of accounts with Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-03/former-twitter-employee-says-fake-russian-accounts-were-not-taken-seriously
In early 2015, a Twitter employee discovered a vast amount of Twitter accounts with IP addresses in Russia and Ukraine. The worker, Leslie Miley, said most of them were inactive or fake but were not deleted at the time. Miley, who was the company's engineering manager of product safety and security at the time, said efforts to root out spam and manipulation on the platform were slowed down by the company's growth team, which focused on increasing users and revenue.
"Anything we would do that would slow down signups, delete accounts, or remove accounts had to go through the growth team," Miley said. "They were more concerned with growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts."
[...]In 2015, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley approached Twitter, asking for help, Miley said. They had found that Twitter had a significant amount of fake accounts, but wanted more data to further their research. Three employees on the product safety and security team, including Miley, met with them. They declined to give the academics data, but the meeting made them curious.
Afterward, the employees ran an analysis on Twitter's accounts. Miley said he was stunned to find that a significant percentage of the total accounts created on Twitter had Russian and Ukrainian IP addresses. According to Miley's recollections, he brought the information to his manager, who told him to take the issue to the growth team. Miley said that he doesn’t have records of the tallies.
"When I brought the information to my boss, the response was 'stay in your lane. That's not your role'," Miley said.
Miley said he advised the growth team to delete most of the accounts they had surfaced from Russia and Ukraine, since the analysis suggested that most were inactive or fake. The growth team didn’t take any action on the Russian and Ukrainian accounts after he presented the data to them, according to Miley.
Many pro-Trump bots that were active during the 2016 U.S. elections were long-dormant accounts, according to researchers. These profiles give the illusion that they’re legitimate, and not created for the sole purpose of spreading propaganda during a campaign, according to Samuel Woolley, research director of the Digital Intelligence Lab at Institute for the Future, a non-profit research organization.