A 3D-printed logo for Twitter is seen in this picture illustration on January 26, 2016. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

(Reuters) - Twitter Inc on Thursday said it removed thousands of accounts linked to coordinated, state-backed activities it believes were from the Iranian government and archived them to its public database launched last year.

In the latest purge of information, the company said it believes 4,779 accounts were associated or backed by Iran.

The micro-blogging site also said it had removed and archived four accounts affiliated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll farm” that has been indicted by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller for attempts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

It also removed and archived 130 accounts tied to the Catalan independence movement in Spain, and 33 accounts engaged in manipulative behavior related to Venezuela.

Twitter first released the archive of data associated with known state-backed information operations last October to provide more transparency of information and to stem manipulation on its platform.

“Thousands of researchers from across the globe have downloaded datasets, which contain more than 30 million Tweets and over 1 terabyte of media, using our archive to conduct their own investigations and to share their insights and independent analysis with the world,” Twitter said in a blog post. </s> Twitter has announced that it has removed thousands of accounts in its latest purge of bad actors on the site and released information relating to state-backed content.

A Catalonian pro-independence party, Iran's government and a commercial entity in Venezuela have all been connected to "coordinated manipulation" on Twitter that breaks the social platform's rules.

Russia's notorious Internet Research Agency (IRA) also gets a mention, albeit briefly, which Twitter attributes to "increased information sharing between industry peers and law enforcement".

Thursday's report follows on from Twitter's mass release in October of content associated with "potential information operations" since 2016.

The IRA featured heavily in the October report, with Twitter releasing details of 3,841 accounts traced back to the Kremlin-linked troll farm.

But the most recent report ties the IRA to just four accounts, which have since been removed from the platform.

Euronews has read through the rest of Twitter's recent report and has broken it down for you below.

Previous reports from cybersecurity company FireEye and Twitter have revealed Iranian-linked accounts taking part in inauthentic behaviour, but both companies distanced themselves from blaming the state.

In Thursday's report, however, Twitter said it had identified 4,779 accounts that were all "associated with — or directly backed by — the Iranian government".

Twitter then broke the activity down into three subsets — 1,666 accounts tweeted news content promoting Iran's diplomatic and geostrategic views, 248 accounts directly engaged in conversation on Israel, and a further 2,865 accounts took on fake personas and tweeted about politics and social issues in Iran and around the world.

The latter example was the subject of a thread posted last month by Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of site integrity, who said the accounts had replied to users, including politicians and journalists.

He added: "Several of the accounts falsely represented themselves as media based in the United States and claimed affiliation without outlets like the New York Daily News, Newsday and the Seattle Times."

Twitter says it has removed 130 suspected fake accounts "directly associated" to the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), a prominent party in the Catalan independence movement. One of these accounts alone had more than 13,000 followers.

The pro-independence ERC won a record number of 15 seats in Spain's parliament following elections in April, which marked the first time since the 1930s that it garnered the most support out of all Catalan parties.

Its leader, Oriol Junqueras, is the former vice-president of Catalonia, and has been in jail since 2017 over the region's failed declaration of independence.

His trial in Madrid ended this week after four months — he could face a 25-year jail sentence if convicted.

The 50-year-old was also elected to European Parliament in last month's election.

According to Twitter's report, the ERC-linked accounts were found to be fake profiles spreading content about the banned 2017 Catalan referendum.

They had been "created with the intent to inorganically influence the conversation in politically advantageous ways," the report said.

This is not the first instance of influencing campaigns uncovered in Catalonia.

Spain's El Pais newspaper released an investigation in 2017 that said the IRA had "used the Catalan crisis as a way to deepen divisions within Europe".

The ERC has not yet responded to Euronews' request for comment on the report from Twitter.

In January, Twitter said it had removed 1,196 accounts it believed was part of a government-backed campaign targeting Venezuelan audiences, and a further 764 accounts it believed were linked to the IRA.

But in Thursday's report, the social network said it had uncovered a further 33 accounts (on top of the 764 from January), in a campaign that it now believed originated from inside Venezuela itself.

It said: "While there were initial indications that these accounts were associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency, our further analysis suggests that they were operated by a commercial entity originating in Venezuela."

"We are sharing further data on this group to update the public on our attribution efforts."

The social platform said it believes such activity from government-linked actors, who are "knowingly trying to manipulate and distort the public conversation", is in the public interest, and should, therefore, be published.

"People and organisations with the advantages of institutional power and which consciously abuse our service are not advancing healthy discourse but are actively working to undermine it," the company added. </s> Twitter said Thursday it had deleted nearly 4,800 suspect accounts linked to Iran that the company says secretly pushed that government’s agenda.

Twitter is adding those accounts and their tweets to a public database it launched last year to track its battle against government-linked misinformation. It is also adding a smaller number of deleted accounts linked to Russia, Venezuela and the Catalonia region of Spain.

The social media giant removed 4,779 accounts “we believe all are associated with — or directly backed by — the Iranian government,” a company statement said. Twitter said the removals are meant to prevent election interference while preserving valid political speech.

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Social media firms like Twitter, Google and Facebook have been accused of allowing political propagandists to use their platforms to hijack elections, poison online debate and smear their opponents. But Twitter, in a blog post by its head of site integrity Yoel Roth, said “transparency is core to our mission” and vowed to fight “misleading, deceptive, and spammy behaviour.”

The company confirmed last month it had removed about 2,800 of the Iranian accounts that were using fake personas.

Twitter launched the database in October. Anyone can download the datasets, which has some information redacted. Researchers can request access to get the unredacted documents.

Thursday’s release was the firm’s third such archive, representing more than 30 million tweets and a terabyte of media data from the just under 5,000 suspected accounts.

Most of the Iranian accounts were found to be spreading news stories angled to support Iranian geopolitical interests or to be fake user profiles designed to manipulate online debate.

A smaller sub-group, originating in Iran, exclusively “engaged with discussions related to Israel.”

Twitter previously targeted alleged Russian bots, and its archive contains four more accounts that the firm believes are associated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

The St. Petersburg-based “troll factory” has been accused of working with Russian intelligence to influence Western votes, notably US President Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Investigations into the Russian agency also led Twitter’s security team to 33 more accounts linked to a previously known group of 764 Venezuelan fake users.

“Our further analysis suggests that they were operated by a commercial entity originating in Venezuela,” the post said.

And in Spain, Twitter took down 130 allegedly fake accounts apparently set up to push the views of Catalan separatists.

“We believe the public and research community are better informed by transparency,” Roth said.

EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova and Security Commissioner Julian King are scheduled to brief reporters Friday on European efforts to fight political disinformation. </s> The Thursday disclosure showed that the social media giant removed 4,779 accounts, which were later categorized into three different sets because their “signals and behaviors” varied.

​The first group, which amounts to 1,666 accounts, was removed because “they tweeted global news content, often with an angle that benefited the diplomatic and geostrategic views of the Iranian state,” a release by Yoel Roth, the head of Twitter’s Site Integrity, reads. He added, “Platform manipulation is a violation of the Twitter Rules.”

Another 248 accounts allegedly originating from Iran were removed from the platform because they “were more directly engaged with discussions related to Israel specifically.” The last set included 2,865 deleted accounts, which were found to have “employed a range of false personas to target conversations about political and social issues in Iran and globally.”

Additionally, the announcement noted that dozens of other accounts originating from Russia, Spain and Venezuela were removed from the social media site. Those accounts include four profiles with ties to the Russia-based Internet Research Agency, 130 accounts linked to the Catalan independence movement and 33 accounts originating from Venezuela that were reportedly “engaging in platform manipulation targeted outside of the country.”

Twitter first began issuing disclosures regarding accounts and content “associated with potential information operations” in October 2018 as a means to be more transparent with information and to stem manipulation on its site. Since then, the social media company has made its datasets available to investigators so that further analysis can be conducted.

“We believe that people and organizations with the advantages of institutional power and which consciously abuse our service are not advancing healthy discourse but are actively working to undermine it,” Roth wrote in the Thursday announcement.

“By making this data open and accessible, we seek to empower researchers, journalists, governments, and members of the public to deepen their understanding of critical issues impacting the integrity of public conversation online, particularly around elections.”

“This transparency is core to our mission,” he added.

This latest development comes weeks after it was reported that both Twitter and Facebook deleted so-called “Iran-linked” accounts based off of information from a report by cybersecurity firm and CIA startup FireEye. However, it was later revealed by Roth that Twitter hadn’t actually been provided with said report when it chopped some 2,800 “inauthentic accounts originating in Iran” from its platform. </s> Twitter has now blocked more than 1 million terrorism accounts from its service.

The social network on Thursday published a blog post detailing the highlights from its 12th biannual Twitter Transparency Report, where it reveals information about accounts it’s removed, inquiries from governments, and data requests. In that post, Twitter revealed that it removed nearly 275,000 terrorist accounts between July 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017. While that was down 8.4% compared to the prior period, the company revealed that it has now banned more than 1.2 million terrorist accounts from its service since August 2015.

In the blog post, the company said that it’s been working for years at making Twitter “an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism.” The company added that online terrorist-related activity is now “increasingly shifting away from Twitter.”

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Like other major tech companies, Twitter shares transparency reports to shed light on what kinds of content is on its network and why certain accounts were removed. In some cases, those accounts are suspended or data accessed because of legal orders or warrants. In others, accounts simply violate Twitter’s terms of service and are removed.

Terrorist organizations have long used social media and other popular services to spread propaganda and recruit new members into their organizations. And although Twitter was quick to celebrate its terrorist-related suspensions, the sheer number of removals in the last quarter, alone, suggest the service is still a sought-after spot for terrorists to land.

According to Twitter, 93% of the terrorist accounts were spotted by its own technologies and nearly three-quarters of accounts were banned before they could post their first tweet. Governments stepped in to alert Twitter to terrorist accounts in 0.2% of cases in the second half of 2017. </s> Twitter on Friday said it has deleted thousands of automated accounts that were posing as belonging to Democrats while trying to spread false information and discourage people from voting in the upcoming midterm elections.

“We stopped this quickly and at its source,” a spokesperson for the company told BuzzFeed News.

Twitter would not confirm how many accounts were deleted. But Reuters reported the company deleted more than 10,000 accounts after they were flagged by Democrats.

Twitter said it has been working closely with both major political parties, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, to monitor any efforts at interfering in Tuesday’s elections, where control of both houses of Congress could be affected.

The deleted accounts appeared to be domestic in origin, and coordinated mischief rather than international interference, Twitter added.

“Our singular goal is to enforce our policies vigorously and protect conversational health on our service,” the company spokesperson said in a statement. “We removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share disinformation in an automated fashion — a violation of our policies.”

According to Reuters, the accounts were flagged by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Officials there did not immediately respond to requests for comment. </s> Just the tip of anti-Iran campaign iceberg?

Twitter has announced that it is removing 4,779 accounts associated or backed by Tehran, the latest strike in the ongoing anti-Iran campaign perfectly timed to coincide with the attack on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was already blaming Iran hours after the incident, offering not a shred of proof aside from a few other dubious incidents in the Middle East that the US has previously pinned on Iran, without evidence.mostly because the narrative is so improbable. Japan's PM Shinzo Abe was in Tehran, promising to use his "utmost effort" to de-escalate tensions,a Japanese ship was hit along with a Norwegian vessel.When even CNN is acknowledging that the attack "doesn't appear to benefit any of the protagonists in the region," and Bloomberg admits "Iran has little to gain" from blowing up the ship of its esteemed guest, Pompeo must realize another route of influence is required. Who better to call in for reinforcements than Twitter, which has demonstrated time and again its willingness to serve the US' preferred narrative with mass deplatformings?- at least, it wasn't Twitter that brought the "Iran Disinformation Project" crashing to a halt earlier this week. The State Department shut down the social media campaign it created to "counter Iranian propaganda" after it supposedly went rogue, smearing any and all critics of Trump's hawkish Iran policy as paid operatives of the Iranian government.Congress only learned of the project in a closed-door hearing on Monday, when the State Department confessed the troll campaign had taken $1.5 million in taxpayer money to attack those same taxpayers - all in the name of promoting "freedom of expression and free access to information."The group contracted to operate Iran Disinfo is run by an Iranian immigrant and claims to focus on strengthening "civil society" and "democracy" back home,While the State Department was long barred from directing government-funded propaganda at its own citizens, that rule was quietly repealed in 2013 with the passage of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act,The Pentagon is also technically forbidden from running psychological operations ("psy-ops") against American citizens, but that rule goes out the window in case of "domestic emergencies" - and the domestic emergency declared by then-President George W. Bush days after the September 11 terror attacks remains in effect,Nor was the State Department's trolling operation the only anti-Iran psy-op to be unmasked this week. Heshmat Alavi, a virulently anti-Iranian columnist promoted by the Trump administration and published in Forbes, the Hill, and several other outlets,, a controversial Iranian exile group often called a cult that has only recently lobbied its way off the US' terror list.The fictional Alavi's stories were used to sell Trump's withdrawal from the Iran deal to the Washington Post and other more reputable outlets, as well as to promote the MEK as a "main Iranian opposition group" and viable option for leadership post-regime-change.Indeed, Alavi's relentless advocacy for the group may have scared off a few of the sites that initially published his work - the Diplomat and the Daily Caller both quit publishing him in 2017, citing quality concerns.a Canadian MEK defector told the Intercept, describing a comprehensive online propaganda mill run out of the group's former base in Iraq that sought to control the narrative about Iran on Facebook and Twitter.The Intercept's comprehensive investigation of the Alavi persona essentially dropped the key to the MEK's propaganda network in Twitter's lap; their refusal to act on this information, merely removing the Alavi account without investigating the swamp of "coordinated inauthentic behavior" surrounding it, indicates they are content with being weaponized in the US propaganda war against Iran. Trolling is fine, as long as it's "our guys" doing it. </s> Twitter has removed more than 10,000 accounts aiming to discourage people from voting in the US midterm elections on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

A Twitter representative confirmed the social media site deleted several automated accounts sharing misinformation, but couldn't confirm the 10,000 figure. The company removed the accounts in September and October, Reuters reports.

The accounts were reportedly made to look like they were from Democrats, but the party reported the tweets to Twitter. The accounts also appeared to be domestic. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

"For the election this year we have established open lines of communication and direct, easy escalation paths for state election officials, DHS, and campaign organizations from both major parties," a Twitter representative said. "We removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share disinformation in an automated fashion - a violation of our policies. We stopped this quickly and at its source."

Twitter has been working to step up its fight against fake accounts. In July, it was reported that the social media company was suspending 1 million accounts a day in its fight against disinformation. In a June blog post, Twitter said it's "now removing 214 percent more accounts for violating our spam policies on a year-on-year basis." Twitter's efforts to combat bots and trolls comes as it deals with revelations that Russian-linked social media troll accounts may have influenced the 2016 US presidential election. </s> Twitter said Friday that it had deleted thousands of automated accounts that were posting messages discouraging people from voting in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Most of the accounts were posing as Democrats, Twitter said.

“We removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share disinformation in an automated fashion – a violation of our policies. We stopped this quickly and at its source,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement provided to CNN Business.

Twitter said that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had brought the accounts to their attention. “For the election this year we have established open lines of communication and direct, easy escalation paths for state election officials, DHS, and campaign organizations from both major parties,” the spokesperson said.

The company said it believes the network of accounts was run from the United States. It would not share any details about what the accounts looked like, or how they were working to discourage voting.

The accounts were taken down in late September and early October, the company said.

Reuters was first to report on the account removals.
Twitter says it has removed thousands of accounts that were being run by the Iranian government, to spread propaganda and fake news on the social media platform. It has also removed over a hundred accounts linked to the Catalan independence movement, and dozens of accounts related to Venezuela.