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> 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 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> 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 and Facebook have landed in hot water for allowing Chinese state-run media outlets to run ads on their platforms that criticize pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

In response, Twitter said Monday that it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled news media outlets. The company also said that it suspended 936 accounts from China that attempted to sow political discord in Hong Kong including efforts to undermine the protests in Hong Kong.

Facebook said that it pulled down 5 Facebook accounts, 7 Pages and 3 Groups with ties to people linked to the Chinese government after it got a tip from Twitter. These users posted about political topics including the Hong Kong protests, but the social network said they were suspending the accounts, pages and groups for misleading others about their identity and purpose.

The moves by the social networks come amid criticism that the companies aren't doing enough to combat disinformation and propaganda on their platforms. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of peaceful activists took to the streets of Hong Kong for the 11th week of demonstrations, CNN reported. Protesters were initially rallying against a now-suspended bill by the Hong Kong government that would have allowed people arrested Hong Kong to be transferred and tried in mainland China. Since then, the protests have expanded to include calls for more democracy and government accountability, according to CNN. Protesters have clashed with police in Hong Kong, who have reportedly fired tear gas and beat activists with batons, according to various media reports.

Now some of the world's largest social networks are under fire for the role they're playing in these political protests. Facebook and Twitter are both blocked in China, but businesses and organizations can still run ads on these platforms.

Maciej Ceglowski, developer of the social-media bookmarking site Pinboard, called on Twitter over the weekend to stop selling ads to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. One promoted tweet from the news outlet stated that "the escalating violence in Hong Kong has taken a heavy toll on the social order" and that "all walks of life in Hong Kong called for a brake to be put on the blatant violence and for order to be restored."

The Xinhua News Agency didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitter pointed to their blog posts about changes to their ads policy and the Chinese accounts the company removed for violating its rules against spam, fake accounts and other forms of "platform manipulation."

Chinese state-run media outlets were also using Facebook to display ads critical of Hong Kong protesters. One ad about the Hong Kong protests by Xinhua states that "calls are mounting for immediate actions to restore order," according to Facebook's ad library. Another ad says that US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has voiced her support for the protesters, "should fly to Hong Kong to see what the true facts are." </s> Tumblr is the latest social media service to uncover Russian state-sponsored efforts to spread propaganda during the 2016 presidential election.

On Friday, Tumblr said it linked 84 accounts to the Internet Research Agency, an organization accused of running an internet troll farm for the Russian government.

Tumblr uncovered the fake accounts last fall and shut them down. "What makes them so difficult to spot is that they're not spambots. They're real people who get trained and paid to spread propaganda," the company said.

BuzzFeed reported on the problem in February, when a researcher noticed that Russian-controlled Tumblr accounts were posing as black activists. The accounts offered critical takes on Hillary Clinton, local police, and white people via memes, animated GIFs, and shared tweets written in English—leaving little reason to suspect the content came from Russia.

Tumblr remained quiet on the matter until Friday when the service explained it had been helping the Department of Justice investigate the fake accounts. This culminated in a federal indictment last month that charged the Internet Research Agency and 13 suspects of trying to meddle in the US election through fake social media accounts.

Tumblr now plans on emailing users who liked, reblogged, replied to, or followed any of the Russian-controlled accounts. "Second, we're going to start keeping a public record of usernames we've linked to the IRA (Internet Research Agency) or other state-sponsored disinformation campaigns," the service said.

The account names include "bleepthepolice," "4mysquad," "swagintherain," "black-to-the-bones," and "stopropaganda." Tumblr is also advising its users to be on guard against future misinformation campaigns. US intelligence officials have warned that foreign agents could very well strike social media again, it said.

In the meantime, Tumblr said it'll monitor account activity for signs of bad actors, and remove the offending accounts. "Disinformation campaigns work because they know people don't fact check," Tumblr said. "Look for reliable sources, and double-check that the source really says the same thing as the post." </s> Twitter and Facebook are all too aware that they’ve been infiltrated by Russia-backed bots.

Twitter, for its part, has purged tens of thousands of accounts associated with Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. The company also said it would email notifications to hundreds of thousands of US users that followed any of the accounts created by the Russian government-linked propaganda factory known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), and has said that it’s trying to get better at detecting and blocking suspicious accounts. (As of January, it said it was detecting and blocking approximately 523,000 suspicious logins daily for being automatically generated).

That’s not good enough, according to California lawmakers. They’ve introduced a bill that would give online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter three days to investigate whether a given account is a bot, to disclose that it’s a bot if it is in fact auto-generated, or to remove the bot outright.

The bill would make it illegal for anyone to use an automated account to mislead the citizens of California or to interact with them without disclosing that they’re dealing with a bot. Once somebody reports an illegally undisclosed bot, the clock would start ticking for the social media platform on which it’s found. The platforms would also be required to submit a bimonthly report to the state’s Attorney General detailing bot activity and what corrective actions were taken.

According to Bloomberg, the legislation is slated to run through a pair of California committees later this month.

Bloomberg quoted Shum Preston, the national director of advocacy and communications at Common Sense Media and a major supporter of the bill. Preston said that California’s on a bit of a guilt trip, given how the social media platforms that have been used as springboards to stir up political and social unrest are parked in its front yard:

New York is also tired of waiting for the Feds to push social media companies into fixing the bot problem. Governor Andrew Cuomo is backing a bill that would require transparency on who pays for political ads on social media.

Proposed legislation at the Federal level includes the bipartisan-supported Honest Ads Act, a proposal to regulate online political ads the same way as television, radio and print, with disclaimers from sponsors.

California’s proposed bill steps it back to the processes that disseminate the content in the first place, but the online platforms say it can be tough to tell human from bot accounts run by ever more sophisticated technologies.

But there are signs to look out for. Twitter has said it’s developed techniques for identifying malicious automation, such as near-instantaneous replies to tweets, non-random tweet timing, and coordinated engagement. It’s also improved the phone verification process and introduced new challenges, including reCAPTCHAs, to validate that a human is in control of an account.

In January, Twitter said that its other plans for 2018 included:
• Investing further in machine-learning capabilities that help detect and mitigate the effect on users of fake, coordinated, and automated account activity.
• Limiting the ability of users to perform coordinated actions across multiple accounts in TweetDeck and via the Twitter API.
• Continuing the expansion of its developer onboarding process to better manage the use cases for developers building on Twitter’s API. This, Twitter said, will help improve how it enforces policies on restricted uses of developer products, including rules on the appropriate use of bots and automation.

Researchers have also been working to come up with a set of tell-tale signs that indicate when non-humans are posting. A 2017 study estimated that as many as 15% of Twitter accounts are bots.

That paper, from researchers at Indiana University and the University of Southern California, also outlines a proposed framework to detect bot-like behavior with the help of machine learning. The data and metadata they took into consideration included social media users’ friends, tweet content and sentiment, and network patterns. One behavioral characteristic they noticed, for example, was that humans tend to interact more with human-like accounts than they do with bot-like ones, on average. Humans also tend to friend each other at a higher rate than bot accounts.

Mind you, not all bots are bad. Take Emoji Aquarium: it’s a bot that shows you a tiny aquarium “full of interesting fishies” every few hours.

Good bots are also useful: they help keep weather, sports, and other news updated in real-time, and they can help find the best price on a product or track down stolen content.

And then too, there’s Bot Hertzberg: the bot created by California Senator Bob Hertzberg to highlight the issue. Hertzberg introduced the pending California bot bill.

Here’s what human Senator Hertzberg, as quoted by Bloomberg, said about his bill:

And here’s what his bot says in its bio: </s> Protesters attend a rally at Victoria Park in Hong Kong, Sunday, Aug. 18, 2019. Heavy rain fell on tens of thousands of umbrella-toting protesters Sunday as they marched from a packed park and filled a major road in Hong Kong, where mass pro-democracy demonstrations have become a regular weekend activity over the summer. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Twitter said it has suspended more than 200,000 accounts that it believes were part of a Chinese government influence campaign targeting the protest movement in Hong Kong.

The company also said Monday it will ban ads from state-backed media companies, expanding a prohibition it first applied in 2017 to two Russian entities.

Both measures are part of what a senior company official portrayed in an interview as a broader effort to curb malicious political activity on a popular platform that has been criticized for enabling election interference around the world and for accepting money for ads that amount to propaganda by state-run media organizations.

The accounts were suspended for violating the social networking platform’s terms of service and “because we think this is not how people can come to Twitter to get informed,” the official said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said the Chinese activity was reported to the FBI, which investigated Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election through social media.

After being notified by Twitter and conducting its own investigation, Facebook said Monday that it has also removed seven pages, three groups and five accounts, including some portraying protesters as cockroaches and terrorists.

The Chinese government said Tuesday it wasn’t aware of the allegations.

Facebook, which is more widely used in Hong Kong, does not release data on such state-backed influence operations. Neither does it ban ads from state-owned media companies.

“We continue to look at our policies as they relate to state-owned media,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to the AP. “We’re also taking a closer look at ads that have been raised to us to determine if they violate our policies.”

Twitter traced the Hong Kong campaign to two fake Chinese and English Twitter accounts that pretended to be news organizations based in Hong Kong, where pro-democracy demonstrators have taken to the streets since early June calling for full democracy and an inquiry into what they say is police violence against protesters.

The Chinese language account, @HKpoliticalnew, and the English account, @ctcc507, pushed tweets depicting protesters as violent criminals in a campaign aimed at influencing public opinion around the world. One of those accounts was tied to a suspended Facebook account that went by the same moniker: HKpoliticalnew.

An additional 936 core accounts Twitter believes originated from within China attempted to sow political discord in Hong Kong by undermining the protest movement’s legitimacy and political positions.

About 200,000 more automated Twitter accounts amplified the messages, engaging with the core accounts in the network. Few tweeted more than once, the official said, mostly because Twitter quickly caught many of them.

The Twitter official said the investigation remains ongoing and there could be further disclosures.

Though Twitter, Facebook and most other foreign social media platforms are banned in China, they’re available in semiautonomous Hong Kong.

At a daily briefing Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he was “not aware” of the allegations of fake accounts, but added that Chinese people had the right to “express their opinions about” the situation in Hong Kong.

The free speech organization PEN America welcomed the tech companies’ actions and urged them to do more.

“China’s government has denied its citizens access to global outlets for communication. That they now turn around and stealthily unleash a campaign of disinformation on the very same platforms represents a new height of hypocrisy,” chief executive Suzanne Nossel said in a statement.

The Twitter campaign reflects that the Chinese government has studied the role of social media in mass movements and fears the Hong Kong protests could spark wider unrest, said James Lewis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“This is standard Chinese practice domestically, and we know that after 2016 they studied what the Russians did in the U.S. carefully,” Lewis said. “So it sounds like this is the first time they’re deploying their new toy.”

Twitter has sought to more aggressively monitor its network for malicious political activity since the 2016 presidential election and to be more transparent about its investigations, publicly releasing data about state-backed influence operations since October so others can evaluate it, the official said.

“We’re not only telling the public this happened, we’re also putting the data out there so people can study it for themselves,” the official said.

As for state-backed media organizations, they are still allowed to use Twitter, but are no longer allowed to pay for ads, which show up regardless of whether you have elected to follow the group’s tweet.

Twitter declined to provide a list of what it considers state-backed media organizations, but a representative said it may consider doing so in the future. In 2017, Twitter specifically announced it would ban Russia-based RT and Sputnik from advertising on its platform.

Associated Press writer Chris Bodeen in Beijing contributed to this report.

This story has been corrected to attribute PEN America statement to the chief executive, not the spokesman. </s> Twitter announced that more Russia-backed troll accounts were active during the 2016 US presidential election than previously thought.

The social network also announced that it plans to notify some 677,775 users who either followed, retweeted or liked a tweet from the more than 50,000 Russia-backed Twitter accounts during the 2016 election cycle.

Twitter has been conducting an ongoing investigation into its own role in the spread of extremist content and "fake news" during the 2016 election.

The investigation unearthed an additional 1,062 accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA), and 13,512 more Russia-based bots than were previously found. The company now believes a total of 3,814 accounts were associated with the IRA, and 50,258 accounts were automated bots linked to Russia.

Going forward, Twitter says it plans to clamp down on usage of the Twitter API, which enables users to perform coordinated actions across multiple accounts in services like Tweetdeck. Twitter will limit the coordination abilities of the API, revamp its developer onboarding process with a focus on policy enforcement, and enforce rules on the appropriate use of bots and automation.

Twitter also plans to bolster investments in machine-learning technology that will help the company "detect and mitigate the effect on users of fake, coordinated, and automated account activity."

Despite the rise in Russia-backed accounts, Twitter insists the total lot accounts for just "two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time."

"However any such activity represents a challenge to democratic societies everywhere, and we're committed to continuing to work on this important issue," the company said.

In an effort of transparency, Twitter is sending out email notifications to the more than 600,000 users who interacted with content from any of the of the since-suspended Russia-linked accounts.

In the past few months, technology giants have faced increased pressure from US and UK governments, and others, to work on curbing terrorist and extremist content online.

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube pledged to build a shared database of digital fingerprints of extremist material of content removed from their services in the hope of making it more difficult to share.

In October, Twitter banned media sites Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik from advertising on its platform after determining that both Kremlin-backed news outlets attempted to interfere with and disrupt the 2016 election.

Looking ahead to the 2018 election, Twitter says plans to better coordinate with federal and state election officials to ensure verification of major party candidates. The company also plans to weed out networks of malicious automation via improvements to its anti-spam technology, and will also "monitor trends and spikes in conversations relating to the 2018 elections for potential manipulation activity."

After facing scrutiny for enabling the spread of "fake news," Twitter cracks down on a campaign ad from a Republican congresswoman for its "inflammatory" content."

The role that social media platforms played in the 2016 US presidential election is being looked into as part of a broader investigation into president Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.

Twitter suspends 299,000 accounts linked to terrorism in past six months

The company said 75 percent of the infringing accounts were suspended before their first tweet.
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.