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Twitter removed thousands of automated accounts with messages that tried to discourage and dissuade voters from voting in the next election next week.
About 10,000 accounts were removed in late September and early October after Democratic Party staff reported them for the first time, the company confirmed.
"We removed a series of accounts for attempting to share disinformation in an automated way, which is a violation of our rules," a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch. "We stopped this quickly and at the source." But the company did not give examples of the types of accounts it deleted, nor who or what could have been behind this activity.
The accounts come in under the name of Democrats and try to convince the key demographic data to stay home and not vote, probably as an attempt to influence the results on key election battlegrounds, according to Reuters, who reported the news for the first time.
A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee did not return a request for comment outside of its opening hours.
Moves are a water drop in the ocean in the face of the larger threats that Twitter faces. Earlier this year, the social networking giant deleted 1.2 million accounts for the sharing and promotion of terrorist content. In May alone, the company was removed just under 10 million accounts every week for sending malicious and automated messages.
Twitter had 335 million monthly active users as of the date of the latest earnings report released in July.
However, lawmakers have criticized the company for failing to do more to proactively remove content that violates its rules or spread misinformation and false news. Just days before Americans vote in the United States, the latest batch of layoffs may raise new concerns that Twitter does not automatically detect malicious accounts.
Following the release of the Reuters report, Yoel Roth, head of integrity of Twitter's website, said a tweet thread that public search identifying bots is often "deeply flawed" and that many identify bots "based on probability, not certainty" because "no one other than Twitter can see non-public internal account data".
Twitter has no strict policy on spreading misinformation in the run-up to elections, unlike Facebook, which recently banned content that was trying to suppress voters with false and misleading information. Instead, Twitter said last year that its "open nature and in real time" is a "powerful antidote to the dissemination of all kinds of false information". But the researchers criticized this approach. A study released last month found that more than 700,000 active accounts in the 2016 presidential election still are, or one million tweets each day.
A spokesman for Twitter added that for this year's elections, the company has "established open lines of communication and easy and direct escalation routes for state election officials, the Homeland Security and the campaign organizations of the two main parties to help us vigorously implement our policies and protect our citizens. conversational health about our service. "
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