Google has revealed what it has discovered while investigating Russian influence on its platforms around the 2016 US presidential election, ahead of its meetings with US lawmakers over Moscow’s role in the last year’s election.

The internet giant found that two accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, which engages in online influence operations on behalf of the Russian government, spent a total $4,700 on search and display ads. These ads were found not to be targeted to a specific group by geography or political preferences.

Meanwhile, on YouTube, it was discovered that there were 18 channels likely to be associated with Russia’s campaign to influence the election result. Across these channels, 1,108 videos were uploaded, representing 42 hours of content and totalling 309,000 US views between June 2015 and November 2016. However, only three per cent of the video had more than 5,000 views.

Once again, Google found that the Russia-linked channels were not specifically targeted toward the US or a particular section of the US population. Nonetheless, all the channels have been suspended.

Google says that, despite questions being raised about the Russian government funded media service, Russia Today (RT) was not found to have manipulated YouTube or violate policies. This view differs to the one taken by Twitter, which moved to ban all advertising from RT and fellow Russian media service Sputnik just last week.

Alphabet-owned Google also reports finding no evidence of state-linked actors artificially boosting their rankings on search, as well as there being no sign of political posts in English from Russian operatives on Google+. However, Gmail accounts were used to open accounts on other platforms, and less than £35 of revenue from ads in AdSense and Ad Exchange came from associated sites.

Google’s announcement comes as it was revealed that Russian ads on Facebook were seen by considerably more people than first thought – up to 116m more people to be exact.

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