Twitter has blocked a number of accounts that belong to African American followers of President Donald Trump and his campaign team.
The users behind the accounts are said to have flouted the rules about spam and manipulation.
An expert investigating misinformation has been monitoring the accounts since Saturday and found that the 24 accounts together were retweeted or mentioned some 265,000 times.
The accounts vary in size, according to the scientist, but some are said to have tens of thousands of followers.
An evaluation of some blocked profiles found that they often had images of people with different names as profile pictures and were using the same language. For example, the phrase “Yes, I’m black, and I vote for Trump!”, Written in capital letters, appeared in the messages of multiple accounts.
Researcher Darren Linvil says most accounts were already created in 2017, but they became more active in the last two months.
Although all accounts Linvill followed have now been blocked, he says the damage is already a fact. It doesn’t matter if Twitter takes them out in four days. The accounts have already had their effect. ‘
Twitter itself did not want to elaborate on the origin of the accounts. President Trump’s campaign team also had no response to the investigation, which the Washington Post first wrote about.
