Twitter bans more psyops accounts: China, UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Ecuador

Twitter announced on Friday it has suspended still more nation-state controlled accounts for conducting information operations. The latest batch of banned psyops accounts originated in China, UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Ecuador.

From the Twitter official blog:

Disclosing new data to our archive of information operations

Friday, 20 September 2019In October 2018, we disclosed the first comprehensive archive of state-backed information operations on Twitter. We launched this initiative to empower academic and public understanding of these coordinated campaigns around the world, and to empower independent, third-party scrutiny of these tactics on our platform.

As our investigations of platform manipulation around the world have continued, we subsequently added new datasets in January, June and August, while also sharing insights on Twitters internal investigative approach and how these complex, sometimes cross-jurisdictional operations are identified.

Nearly one year on, the archive is now the largest of its kind in the industry. Thousands of researchers have made use of these datasets that contain millions of individual Tweets and more than one terabyte of media. Using our archive, these researchers have conducted their own investigations and shared their insights and independent analyses with the world.

Transparency and openness are deep-seated values at the heart of Twitter which define and guide our methodology around these disclosures. Today, we are disclosing six additional datasets covering five separate jurisdictions. Per our policies on platform manipulation, we have permanently suspended all the below accounts from the service.

United Arab Emirates & EgyptWe have removed a network of 273 accounts originating in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt.