Twitter Shuts Down 5000 State-Sponsored Accounts Twitter has taken down nearly 5000 fake accounts, most of them apparently backed by the Iranian state, in a bid to clean the platform of government-sponsored attempts to spread propaganda. The social network claimed in a post last week that it had closed 4779 accounts linked to Tehran, 1666 of which tweeted nearly two million times, with content “that benefited the diplomatic and geostrategic views of the Iranian state.” Another subset of 248 accounts were engaged with discussions related to Israel, while 2865 “employed a range of false personas to target conversations about political and social issues in Iran and globally.” Four accounts were lined to the infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Kremlin-linked organization responsible for a mass disinformation campaign on social media ahead of the 2016 US Presidential election.

Read full article on Infosecurity