486 Twitter Accounts Banned for Anti-Trump Commentary

• With reports for misinformation being spread through organized channels, Twitter has banned hundreds of accounts for coordinated manipulation.
• The social media company had already acted on previous reports about Iranian and Russian groups last year and deleted hundreds of accounts.
• The move comes after the company’s decision to act against bots, hate speech, and fake news.

Twitter has been at the receiving end of a lot of criticism due to the company’s negligence towards bots and the rise of fake news and hate speech on the platform. The microblogging platform is now taking active steps to ensure the community guidelines are followed.

Last week, Twitter had deleted 284 accounts from Iranian and Russian misinformation groups that were responsible for spreading fake news and manipulation political beliefs in people. Another 486 accounts were removed by the platform for coordinated manipulation. Most of the banned accounts are under a year old and had a total of 1286 unique followers. The divisive commentary from the accounts was targeted towards United States President Donald Trump.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1034209208982335488

Twitter’s cleanup operation has been ongoing for months now and millions of accounts have been acted against already. The company is slowly trying to eliminate misinformation, hate speech and fake news on the platform. Despite an initial drop in numbers, Twitter is reported to be more active due to a cleaner environment. According to CEO Jack Dorsey "Our second quarter results reflect the work we're doing to ensure more people get value from Twitter every day.”

Facebook, Google, and Instagram have also recently acted against hundreds of accounts for misinformation. The accounts were originally identified by Reddit moderators a year ago but no action was taken against them until recently. With billions of users using social media platforms, it becomes very easy for political groups to spread fake news and influence voters. Facebook, in particular, has been trying to avoid political controversies by keeping an eye on politically influential groups ahead of the US midterm elections scheduled for November.

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