Twitter shuts thousands of propaganda accounts in six countries, majority from China

Twitter on Thursday said it had shut down nearly 3,500 accounts that were posting pro-government propaganda in six countries, the majority of which were from China.

"We removed a network of accounts that amplified Chinese Communist Party narratives related to the treatment of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. Today, we're releasing a representative sample of 2,048 accounts," Twitter said in a statement.

"We also removed a network of 112 accounts connected to 'Changyu Culture,' a private company backed by the Xinjiang regional government," it added.

Twitter said that it first published a public archive of data related to state-backed information operations three years ago.

Since that first disclosure in October 2018, Twitter has shared 37 datasets of attributed platform manipulation campaigns originating from 17 countries, spanning more than 200 million Tweets and nine terabytes of media.

"Today, we're disclosing an additional 3,465 accounts to our archive of state-linked information operations -- the only one of its kind in the industry," the company statement said.

The account sets include eight distinct operations Twitter attributed to six countries - Mexico, the People's Republic of China (PRC), Russia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Venezuela.

( With inputs from ANI )