Twitter deletes 20,000 fake accounts linked to Saudi, Serbian and Egyptian governments
Source: The Guardian
Twitter deletes 20,000 fake accounts linked to Saudi, Serbian and Egyptian governments
Accounts also linked to Honduras and Indonesia violated policy and were targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation
Julian Borger in Washington
Thu 2 Apr 2020 18.56 BST
Last modified on Thu 2 Apr 2020 20.10 BST
Twitter has deleted 20,000 fake accounts linked to the governments of Serbia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Honduras and Indonesia, saying they violated company policy and were a targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation.
Yoel Roth, the head of site integrity, said the removal of the accounts was part of the companys ongoing work to detect and investigate state-backed information operations.
Of the accounts removed on Thursday, 8,558 were linked to the Serbian Progressive party (SNS) of Aleksandar Vučić, the president. The accounts had posted more than 43m tweets amplifying positive news coverage of Vučićs government and attacking his political opponents.
Twitter also removed a network of 5,350 accounts linked to the Saudi monarchy operating out of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Together they had tweeted 36.5m times praising the Saudi leadership or criticising Qatar and Turkish activity in Yemen.
The takedown of the accounts followed a tip from the Stanford Internet Observatory, which said that network had also generated tweets supportive of the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar.
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Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/twitter-accounts-deleted-linked-saudi-arabia-serbia-egypt-governments