Twitter removed around 130 Iranian accounts for attempting to disrupt the public recent US Presidential Debate.
The social media giant Twitter announced to have removed around 130 Iranian Twitter accounts that attempted to disrupt the public conversation during the recent first Presidential Debate for the US 2020 Presidential Election.
The company confirmed that it discovered the activity of the accounts following an alert from the FBI.
According to Twitter, the 130 accounts were quickly removed and appeared to originate in Iran.
Based on intel provided by the @FBI, last night we removed approximately 130 accounts that appeared to originate in Iran. They were attempting to disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 US Presidential Debate.— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 1, 2020The company added that the removed accounts had a very low engagement, this means that their potential impact on the public conversation was limited.
We identified these accounts quickly, removed them from Twitter, and shared full details with our peers, as standard. They had very low engagement and did not make an impact on the public conversation. Our capacity and speed continue to grow, and we’ll remain vigilant. Samples pic.twitter.com/1qzzL8l29H— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 1, 2020In line with its principles of transparency and to improve public understanding of inauthentic influence campaigns, Twitter will publish details of this operation in its
Twitter said it plans to publish details about the removed accounts and their tweets on its Transparency portal‘s section related to information operations carried out by nation-state actors.
As standard, the accounts and their content will be published in full once our investigation is complete. We’re providing this notice to keep people updated in real time about our actions. We wish to thank the @FBI for their assistance. More on our work: https://t.co/jSJRGZVRNI— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 1, 2020In September, the social network announced new measures to protect high-profile accounts during the upcoming US Presidential election.
The types of accounts that are in this designated group are:
US Executive Branch and CongressUS Governors and Secretaries of StatePresidential campaigns, political parties and candidates with Twitter Election Labels running for US House, US Senate, or GovernorMajor US news outlets and political journalistsTwitter will use an internal notification service to alert owners of accounts associated with people in the above group.
The company also started using warning labels on several tweets considered as misleading messages because they were providing inaccurate information about voting and the electoral process.
Early September, Facebook and Twitter removed social media accounts for a news organization named PeaceData, which used as part of Russia’s state propaganda system.
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Pierluigi Paganini
(SecurityAffairs – hacking, 2020 Presidential Election)
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