For trying to discourage people from participating in the midterm elections in US, Twitter has deleted over 10,000 accounts. Twitter spokesman said that the company has taken action after the Democratic party found misleading tweets that appeared to be discouraging people from voting in the forthcoming election.
The spokesman said: “We took action on relevant accounts and activity on Twitter.” The number is lower than the previous eliminations by Twitter who had removed millions of accounts that took part in spreading false information during the 2016 presidential election.
According to Reuters, it appears that the removals had taken place towards the end of September and the beginning of October.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had created a campaign this year in order to try to hold Twitter and other social media platforms to account for their previous lack of response to negative and false information that was posted on their sites about their former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other 2016 candidates.
The Democrats are hoping that by flagging accounts that are spreading misinformation, that they will see more progress in social media’s reaction speed. One of the recent tweets that were plagued by the Democrats were messages to men.
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It told them that they should not vote because they would drown out the voices of women voters.
DCCC were able to find these messages due to the party creating its own system that identifies and reports malicious automated accounts.
This system is part of publicly available tools called “Hoaxley” and “Bolometer” that were developed by computer researchers at the University of Indiana. They allow users to identify automated accounts and further analyse how they are spreading information about a specific topic.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) also works with a group of contractors and other partners that all work to try to identify misinformation campaigns as quickly as possible.
One of these partners includes RoBhat Labs who develops technology that can identify bots and what the political-bias is in the message.