Twitter removed over 50,000 posts spreading false and inaccurate news about the war in Ukraine. This was underlined by the social network on its official blog, through an update on the activities taken to make the debate on the conflict healthier.
The platform removed a total of 75,000 accounts for “inauthentic behavior” and spam. A number, explains the security team, which includes both users involved in war propaganda and accounts associated with #IStandWithPutin, a hashtag that went viral last month thanks to a coordinated campaign that also affected Italy with the #IoStoConPutin trend.
In its research, Twitter has traced the spread of viral posts to a wide range of actors, who have begun to circulate footage of old conflicts as if they were new, as well as fake fundraisers for Ukrainians, actually targeting to scammers’ accounts.
As of February 28, Twitter claims to have tagged more than 61,000 unique posts that included links to Russian state media, with misleading content. In response, the American company had decided to black out two profiles of Kremlin-related broadcasters, RT and Sputnik, before readmitting them by flagging their posts as “state-run media.”
Twitter explains that the move reduced the reach of these tweets by about 30%. Only yesterday, a fake video of Ukrainian President Zelensky, made with the technique of deepfake, which uses artificial intelligence to mimic people’s faces and speech, had collected over 114,000 views on the microblog. A few hours later it was removed on both Twitter and Facebook.