translated from Spanish: Twitter deleted thousands of fake news accounts: many were operated by political parties

The management behind one of today’s most important social networks, Twitter, said Friday that will give way to the removal of thousands of accounts by spreading fake news. Many of these accounts are linked to political parties, in fact more than a thousand were related to the Alliance COUNTRY party, ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno – a strong opponent of Rafael Correa – and more than 200 operated by the Spanish People’s Party. Regarding the measure they indicated from Twitter that “According to our policy on manipulation on our platform, we permanently suspend all these accounts”. From Twitter they stated that 1,019 Ecuadorian accounts – mostly fake – were used to support Alianza COUNTRY and were “mainly dedicated to spreading content about President Moreno’s administration, focusing on issues related to the Ecuadorians on freedom of expression, government censorship and technology,” adding that “The most commonly used tactics were the manipulation of ‘hashtags’ and the forwarding of ‘spam'”. In Spain, 259 accounts were cancelled, which “artificially boosted public opinion” in the country and were “operated by the Popular Party”. In this case they also “consisted mainly of fake accounts with ‘spam’ or retweeting to increase engagement,” they noted from Twitter.While the Middle East was concerned 267 accounts ‘interconnected’ with ‘interconnected’ with United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt, which were used to develop “a multifaceted information operation aimed primarily at Qatar and other adversaries such as Iran”. Another large amount, on this occasion of 4,258, were closed. These were not interconnected and “operated exclusively from the United Arab Emirates, mainly aimed at Qatar and Yemen”. His goal was to publish false information about the war in Yemen, where Riyadh has been assisting the government militarily since 2015 in the fight against Houthi rebels, supported by Iran.Six accounts “linked to the state media system of Saudi Arabia” that “presented themselves as independent news media while tweeting, favourably, about the government of that nation,” including the account of Saúd al Cahtani, former adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in court actual “for violations of our manipulation policies,” Twitter said.From the social network they also indicated that they will publish data regarding 4,302 fake accounts that participated in the 200,000 network accounts “trying to sow discord about the protest movement in Hong Kong” and were identified in August.

Original source in Spanish