San Francisco (AFP)
Twitter announced on Friday that it had suspended more than 88,000 accounts involved in a manipulation and disinformation operation orchestrated by Saudi Arabia.
Most of these profiles were in Arabic and served as sounding boards "for messages in favor of the Saudi authorities", but some were in English and targeted Western audiences, detailed the platform.
Twitter set out to dismantle this network in 2018. The Californian company managed to better understand the players involved this fall, and took drastic measures last October.
Of these 88,000 accounts, the platform has published information on a core of nearly 6,000 accounts, representative of the whole, for "transparency" purposes.
"Rigorous investigations by our teams have allowed us to link these accounts to a major propaganda operation carried out on Twitter from Saudi Arabia," said the social network.
The shared content dates from the end of 2016, and appears to support Donald Trump when he was a candidate and just after his election.
Many accounts involved used automated tools to widely circulate non-political messages, Twitter said.
These tools are usually used to propagate important announcements in the event of a crisis, and do not violate the rules of the platform.
But "these tactics made it more difficult for observers who had to spot political tweets on accounts that essentially shared non-political content automatically," the company said.
Networks like Facebook and Twitter are actively fighting against the numerous operations of manipulation of opinion orchestrated in particular from China, India, Russia and even Saudi Arabia.
In September, a report from the Oxford Internet Institute found that the number of campaigns had doubled in two years, and that they came from both democratic and authoritarian governments.
© 2019 AFP