translated from Spanish: Twitter announces the closure of thousands of fake accounts worldwide

Twitter announced on Friday (20.09.2019) the closure of thousands of accounts for spreading fake news, including more than a thousand related to Ecuador’s Alliance COUNTRY party of Chilean President Lenin Moreno and more than 200 operated by the Spanish People’s Party. “According to our policy on tampering on our platform, we permanently suspend all these accounts,” Twitter announced.
Facebook, for its part, also today announced the suspension of “tens of thousands” of applications on its platform as part of a review of privacy practices following the scandal involving consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Ime Archibong, Facebook’s vice president of business associations, said in a statement that the inquiry “addressed millions of applications. Of these, tens of thousands have been suspended for a variety of reasons as we continue to investigate.”
Mark Zuckerberg at the White House
Suspension “doesn’t necessarily mean these apps were a threat to people,” he said. According to the executive, some of the developers of the suspended apps simply “did not respond” to the company’s request for information, which last month has already removed a multitude of fake accounts based in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates by publish misinformation on some points of the Middle East conflict and others with “coordinated inauthentic behavior” focused on Hong Kong.
The news was announced amid a visit by Zuckerberg to Washington, where he discussed with parliamentarians issues related to privacy, data protection, transparency and competition. He also met with President Donald Trump at the White House.
Twitter accounts in Ecuador and Spain
The list of suspended Twitter accounts includes 1,019 Ecuadorian accounts – mostly fake – linked to the political governing party Alianza COUNTRY that were “mainly dedicated to spreading content about the administration of President Moreno, focusing on issues related to Ecuador’s laws on freedom of expression, government censorship and technology,” the social network said. “The most commonly used tactics were manipulating ‘hashtags’ and forwarding ‘spam,’ he added.
“This movement denies that you have created or financed troll support accounts for any cause. The only official accounts are those of AP Nacional 25PAIS and those that have created its provincial directors to communicate their militancy in territory”, the Alliance COUNTRY party denied on its website. Twitter also deleted 259 accounts originating in Spain that “artificially boosted public opinion” in the country. “Operated by the People’s Party (…) they consisted mainly of fake accounts with ‘spam’ or retweeting to increase engagement,” Twitter explained.
Fake accounts in TheUnited Arab Emirates
Twitter also suspended 4,258 accounts that “operated exclusively from the United Arab Emirates, mainly targeted at Qatar and Yemen.” These accounts published false information about the war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been assisting the government militarily since 2015 in the fight against The Houthi rebels, supported by Iran. A further 267 “interconnected” accounts originating in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt were closed after it was detected that it was “a multifaceted information operation primarily targeted against Qatar and other adversaries such as Iran”.
The remainder of the list includes six accounts “linked to Saudi Arabia’s state media system” that “presented themselves as independent news media while tweeting, favorably, about saudi government,” and Saúd’s account Cahtani, former adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman in the royal court “for violations of our manipulation policies.”

Original source in Spanish