Twitter has deleted 20,000 fake accounts linked to the governments of Serbia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Honduras and Indonesia, saying that they violated company policy and were a “targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation”. Twitter's head of site integrity Yoel Roth said the operation was part of Twitter's ongoing work to "detect and investigate state-backed information operations". The Stanford Internet Observatory has analysed and presented its findings in this blog post, and has also put out detailed whitepapers for each country. Accounts removed from Serbia: The largest number of accounts removed came from Serbia, where 8,558 accounts promoting Serbia's president Aleksandar Vučić and the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) were purged. The accounts put out 43 million tweets promoting SNS and Vučić, attacking their political opponents, and amplifying content from news outlets favourable to them. The accounts served as "coordinated pro-Vučić brigade", putting out 2 million tweets hashtagged #Vucic and #vucic. The tweets had 8.5 million links to SNS's official website, and to 3 Vučić-aligned news websites. Saudi Arabia removed accounts were associated with DotDev and Smaat: A network of 5,350 accounts associated with Saudi Arabia, but operating out of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, were promoting content praising the Saudi government, and critical of the Qatar and Turkish activity in Yemen. The accounts were linked to digital marketing firms DotDev, based out of Egypt and UAE; and to Smaat, based out of Saudi Arabia. Twitter had removed accounts associated with both firms late last year. These accounts were removed following a tip from the Stanford…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...