Twitter announced on Tuesday it had removed 373 accounts linked to state-affiliated actors in Russia, Armenia and Iran for breaching its platform manipulation policies.
Iran
"As we proactively communicated in October 2020, and based on information provided to us by the FBI, we removed approximately 130 accounts originating in Iran that were attempting to disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 US Presidential Debate. "
Armenia
"We investigated and removed 35 accounts that had ties to the Government of Armenia. These accounts were created in order to advance narratives that were targeting Azerbaijan and were geostrategically favorable to the Armenian government. In some cases, the fake accounts purported to represent government and political figures in Azerbaijan, as well as news entities claiming to operate in Azerbaijan."
Russia
Twitter said accounts linked to Russian state actors were banned for amplifying narratives to undermine faith in NATO and targeted the United States and the European Union.
"Today we’re disclosing two separate networks that have Russian ties.
Our first investigation found and removed a network of 69 fake accounts that can be reliably tied to Russian state actors. A number of these accounts amplified narratives that were aligned with the Russian government, while another subset of the network focused on undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
As part of our second investigation in this region, we removed 31 accounts from two networks that show signs of being affiliated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Russian government-linked actors. These accounts amplified narratives that had been previously associated with the IRA and other Russian influence efforts targeting the United States and European Union."
"With every disclosure we make, we want to continue to educate people on the tactics used by state actors in order to manipulate or undermine the open democratic conversation that happens on Twitter. Since we launched our first archive in October 2018, we have disclosed data related to more than 85,000 accounts associated with platform manipulation campaigns originating from 20 countries, to our information operations archive.," said Twitter in a blog post.
