INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Twitter has deleted thousands of automated accounts posting messages that tried to discourage and dissuade voters from casting their
ballot in the upcoming election next week.
Some 10,000 accounts were removed across late September and early October after they were first
flagged by staff at the Democratic Party, the company has confirmed.
&We removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share
disinformation in an automated fashion & a violation of our policies,& said a Twitter spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch
&We stopped this quickly and at its source.& But the company did not provide examples of the kinds of accounts it removed, or say who or
what might have been behind the activity.
The accounts posed as Democrats and try to convince key demographics to stay at home and not vote,
likely as an attempt to sway the results in key election battlegrounds, according to Reuters, which first reported the news.
A spokesperson
for the Democratic National Committee did not return a request for comment outside its business hours.
The removals are a drop in the ocean
to the wider threats that Twitter faces
Earlier this year, the social networking giant deleted 1.2 million accounts for sharing and promoting terrorist content
In May alone, the company deleted just shy of 10 million accounts each week for sending malicious, automated messages.
Twitter had 335
million monthly active users as of its latest earnings report in July.
But the company has faced criticism from lawmakers for not doing more
to proactively remove content that violates its rules or spreads disinformation and false news
With just days before Americans are set to vote in the U.S
midterms, this latest batch of takedowns is likely to spark further concern that Twitter did not automatically detect the malicious
accounts.
Following the publication of Reuters& report, Yoel Roth, Twitter head of site integrity, said in a tweet thread that public
research identifying bots is often &deeply flawed& and that many are identifying bots &based on probability, not certainty,& since &nobody
other than Twitter can see non-public, internal account data.&
Twitter does not have a strict policy on the spread of disinformation in the
run-up to election season, unlike Facebook, which recently banned content that tried to suppress voters with false and misleading
Instead, Twitter said last year that its &open and real-time nature& is a &powerful antidote to the spreading of all types of false
information.& But researchers have been critical of that approach
Research published last month found that more than 700,000 accounts that were active during the 2016 presidential election are still active
to this day — pushing a million tweets each day.
A Twitter spokesperson added that for the election this year, the company has
&established open lines of communication and direct, easy escalation paths for state election officials, Homeland Security, and campaign
organizations from both major parties to help us enforce our policies vigorously and protect conversational health on our
service.&
Thousands of Twitter accounts that spread fake news during the 2016 election are still active today, say researchers
