Saudi Press Agency via AP
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, left, speaks to his father, King Salman, right, at a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Sunday, Dec. 9, 2018.
- Twitter removed nearly over 88,000 accounts that it says were tied to a disinformation campaign backed by the Saudi Arabian government, the company announced Friday.
- The company published data on nearly 6,000 of those accounts, but is keeping the rest of the accounts confidential because they may represent compromised accounts repurposed for the spam campaign.
- The accounts were removed for "platform manipulation," aggressively posting messages that aligned with Saudi Arabia's interests, Twitter said.
- It's one of the largest single crackdowns on state-backed accounts in Twitter's history.
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Twitter removed over 88,000 accounts that it says were engaged in "platform manipulation" originating from Saudi Arabia, it announced in a blog post Friday.
The accounts engaged in "spammy behavior," Twitter said, aggressively liking, retweeting, and replying to amplify messages that were favorable to the Saudi Arabian government's interests. Twitter's investigation revealed that the accounts originated from a Saudi Arabian social media marketing company called Smaat, which also manages several official Saudi Arabian government accounts.
The tweets were primarily in Arabic, but a small portion of content targeted Western audiences. Those tweets advocated for pro-Saudi positions regarding sanctions in Iran and public opinion regarding Saudi government officials.
Twitter published comprehensive data on 5,929 of those accounts, but is keeping the rest confidential to protect the privacy of "potentially compromised accounts" that were used for the spam campaign.
It's one of the largest single crackdowns on state-backed accounts, according to Twitter's transparency blog. Twitter banned nearly 3,000 accounts originating from Iran in May and June, and has removed other accounts tied to Russia and Venezuela. Twitter banned hundreds of millions of accounts in early 2018, according to The Washington Post, but it's not clear whether those were tied to state-backed misinformation.
It's not the first time Twitter has faced Saudi-backed information campaigns this year. In November, federal prosecutors charged two former Twitter employees with spying on behalf of the Saudi government beginning in 2015.