Twitter banned a network of fake accounts pretending to be Black people leaving the Democratic party to support Trump

• Twitter took down several fake accounts posing as Black people who claimed they were leaving the Democratic party to support Trump, the company said this week.
• One account claimed to be a lifelong Democrat who decided to vote Republican because of the Black Lives Matter movement, receiving over 10,000 retweets. Its profile picture was stolen from a model's Instagram page.
• Twitter said it suspended the accounts for violating its rules on spam and platform manipulation.

Twitter recently took action against a network of fake accounts posing as Black people supporting Trump, the company said this week.

Three accounts were reportedly taken down for violating Twitter's rules on spam, NBC News first reported. At least five tweets from the accounts, which used Black men's photos as their profile pictures, went viral with over 10,000 retweets.

One of those accounts, @WentDemToRep, received over 13,000 retweets on a post claiming to have become a Republican after witnessing Black Lives Matter protests over the summer. Its profile picture was stolen from a Dutch model's Instagram page, NBC's Ben Collins reported.

Another account, @KRON619, used a stock photo of a Black man as its profile picture and tweeted "I left the Dems last month cuz I finally saw their racism." It received over 12,000 retweets.

Both accounts have since been suspended for violating Twitter's rules against spam, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.

Twitter has been taking increasing action against accounts that violate its policies on coordinated inauthentic behavior ahead of the 2020 election. The company suspended 7,000 accounts that circulated content related to the QAnon conspiracy theory last month, many of which violated its policy against running multiple accounts at once.

In June, Twitter said it shut down three networks of more than 170,000 accounts spreading propaganda from China, Russia, and Turkey, calling them a "targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation."