Twitter on Thursday said it has deleted thousands of fake accounts from Bangladesh, Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
It also released information about behaviour on the platform related to the 2018 US midterm elections, reports UNB.
Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth wrote on its official blog post: “As noted last December, working with our industry peers we identified and suspended a very small number of accounts originating from Bangladesh for engaging in coordinated platform manipulation.”
“The Tweets were entirely in Bengali and focused on regional political themes. All of these accounts and content are now part of the archive and can be investigated and reviewed by interested parties," he said.
Working with our industry peers we identified & suspended a very small number of accounts originating from Bangladesh for engaging in coordinated platform manipulation. Based on our initial analysis, it appears that some of these accounts may have ties to state-sponsored actors.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) December 20, 2018
He also said it has “identified and suspended 2,617 additional malicious accounts” in Iran, and removed over 1,000 accounts located in Venezuela, which has been undergoing major political upheaval.
By last September, Twitter had taken down 3,843 accounts it linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), the social media company wrote in the post on its website.
"Our ongoing efforts have uncovered an additional 418 accounts. We cannot render definitive attribution to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) for these accounts, although most appear to originate in Russia," said Twitter.
"We have removed 1,196 accounts located in Venezuela which appear to be engaged in a state-backed influence campaign targeting domestic audiences," said the micro-blogging platform.
It also removed 764 accounts located in Venezuela tied to information operations of a foreign government against another country.
