Twitter this week announced that it has suspended multiple accounts that were found to be part of four networks involved in disinformation activities associated with Armenia, Iran, and Russia.
The threat actors behind these accounts are believed to be state-sponsored, and Twitter permanently suspended all four networks, for violating its manipulation policies.
The Iran-linked accounts, the social media platform says, were part of a network that was initially dismantled in October 2020. Roughly 130 accounts part of that network were suspended at the time, based on information provided by the FBI.
The accounts were “attempting to disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 US Presidential Debate,” Twitter says. The investigation into the network has resulted in an additional 108 accounts operating from Iran being suspended.
The accounts in this network, Twitter underlines, had low engagement, with little impact on public conversation.
A total of 35 accounts linked to the government of Armenia were recently removed from Twitter, all created to “advance narratives that were targeting Azerbaijan and were geostrategically favorable to the Armenian government,” the company says.
Some of the fake accounts claimed to represent government and political figures or news entities in Azerbaijan. The network engaged in spam campaigns to attract followers and amplify the narrative.
Other networks that were recently suspended were found to be linked to Russia, Twitter reveals.
Consisting of 69 fake accounts, the first of the networks was tied to Russian state actors and was meant to amplify narratives aligned with the interests of the Russian government. A subset of the network was focused on “undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.”
An additional 31 accounts that were part of two other networks were believed to be affiliated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and with Russian government-linked actors.
“These accounts amplified narratives that had been previously associated with the IRA and other Russian influence efforts targeting the United States and European Union,” Twitter explains.
All of these accounts have been added to Twitter’s archive of state-linked information operations, allowing researchers to conduct their own investigations and analysis. Since October 2018, Twitter has suspended more than 85,000 accounts associated with manipulation campaigns.
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