Conservatives crying foul over Twitter bot purge
Social network claims it’s not about politics
SAN FRANCISCO – Conservative Twitter users raged against the social media company, lobbing accusations of left-wing bias and censorship after thousands of followers were wiped out in an overnight bot purge.
The suspension of multiple accounts followed the indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller of Russian nationals for meddling in the U.S. election, including using fake accounts on Twitter to conduct “information warfare” against the U.S.
The hashtag #TwitterLockOut was trending in the U.S. on Wednesday morning as thousands of accounts, including those belonging to Michael Flynn Jr., son of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson complained that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of their followers had been shut down. “The twitter purge is real,” Fox News commentator Dan Bongino wrote. “I woke up and saw I lost 100 or so followers,” columnist Adriana Cohen tweeted.
Twitter would not say how many accounts it purged. “As part of our ongoing work in safety, we identify suspicious account behaviors that indicate automated activity or violations of our policies around having multiple accounts, or abuse,” Twitter said in a statement. “Twitter’s tools are apolitical, and we enforce our rules without political bias.”
Social media services have been struggling to eradicate fake or abusive content without appearing to censor opinions. Bots — accounts powered by automated software, not people — have plagued Twitter for years. Researchers estimate as many as 15% of accounts on Twitter could be fake. Twitter says that number is lower.
Until scrutiny of bots intensified after the presidential election, Twitter had little incentive to remove fake accounts that pad its user and growth numbers, critics say. Last month, Twitter shut down more than 1 million fake accounts uncovered by a New
York Times report. According to Twitter’s rules, automated software is permitted to tweet but is banned from posting misleading or abusive content or spam.
Fake accounts on Twitter have been traced to a Kremlin-linked “troll farm” accused of inflaming political divisions. According to researchers at the University of Southern California, conservatives retweeted Russian trolls about 31 times as often as liberals and produced 36 times as many tweets.
An organization that tracks Kremlin-backed Twitter accounts — the Alliance for Securing Democracy — says such influence operations have remained active since the election. On Wednesday, #twitterlockout and #twitterpurge were the top and trending hashtags used by the accounts linked to Russian influence operations tracked by the Alliance.
Cutting off bot-generated content is a pressing issue for Twitter, which needs to grow its user base. Conservative users and supporters of President Trump say Twitter uses a double standard, singling out voices on the right.