Twitter deleted thousands of accounts that tried to discourage voters from voting

Twitter was reportedly removed thousands of accounts on its platform posting messages, trying to dissuade and discourage the democrats voters from voting in the next week election.

According to the company, Up to 10,000 accounts were removed across late September and early October after they were first raised by the staff at the Democratic Party. “We removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share disinformation in an automated fashion, which violate our policies”. “We stopped it quickly and at its source,” said by a Twitter spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch.

However, the company has not yet disclosed samples of the kind of accounts it deleted, or say who or what might have been behind the activity.

These accounts pretend to be Democrats and try to convince major demographics to stay in their home and not vote, most likely as an attempt to shake the results in the major election battleground, according to Reuters, which first reported the news.

A request for comment from a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee outside its business hours was rejected.

The deletion of accounts is just a minor issue from a wider threats facing Twitter. The giant company also deleted up to 1.2 millionaccounts for sharing and promoting terrorist content earlier this year. Also in May, Twitter removed a number of 10 million accounts each week for sending malicious and automated messages.

According to Twitter’s latest earning report in July, it has 335 million monthly active users. But the company has faced criticism from lawmakers for not going extra miles to quickly remove content that violates its rules or spreads misleading information and false news.

With just a few days before the U.S. midterm election, this quick action is likely to raise further concern that Twitter did not automatically detect the malicious accounts.

Unlike Facebook, which recently blocked content that tried to discourage voters with fake and misleading information, Twitter does not have a strict policy on the spread of misleading information in the run-up to election season. Instead, Twitter said that its “open and real-time nature” is a “powerful antidote to the spreading of all types of fake news,” last year.

However, researchers have been critical of that method. Research published last month show that more than 700,000 accounts that were active during the 2016 presidential election are still in use till today, publishing a million of tweets every day.

According to a Twitter spokesperson, for this year election, the company has “established open lines of communication and direct, easy escalation paths for state election officials, Homeland Security, and campaign organizations from both major parties to help us enforce our policies vigorously and protect conversational health on our service.”