Twitter shuts thousands of accounts posting pro-govt propaganda, mostly in China

Twitter on Thursday said it had shut down nearly 3,500 accounts that were posting pro-government propaganda in six countries, the majority of which were from China. "We removed a network of accounts that amplified Chinese Communist Party narratives related to the treatment of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. Today, we're releasing a representative sample of 2,048 accounts," Twitter said in a statement.

"We also removed a network of 112 accounts connected to 'Changyu Culture,' a private company backed by the Xinjiang regional government," it added.

Twitter said that it first published a public archive of data related to state-backed information operations three years ago.

Since that first disclosure in October 2018, Twitter has shared 37 datasets of attributed platform manipulation campaigns originating from 17 countries, spanning more than 200 million Tweets and nine terabytes of media.

"Today, we're disclosing an additional 3,465 accounts to our archive of state-linked information operations -- the only one of its kind in the industry," the company statement said.

The account sets include eight distinct operations Twitter attributed to six countries - Mexico, the People's Republic of China (PRC), Russia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Venezuela. 

Twitter appoints new CEO

Just days ago, Jack Dorsey was resigned as Twitter and he was replaced by Parag Agrawal who was the Chief Technology Officer there. The elevation of Parag Agrawal as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Twitter has once again highlighted the fact that many prominent global technology companies are headed by Indian-origin techies. The 37-year-old computer scientist with a PhD from Stanford will take over the CEO of the microblogging site immediately, following Jack Dorsey's surprise resignation. Agrawal has joined the likes of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, who all are at the helm of global tech.

Bloomberg reports thatParag Agrawal is now the youngest CEO in the S&P 500, but apparently just barely. Agrawal, who was appointed Monday to succeed Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, is 37, the same age as Meta Platform Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Citing security concerns, Twitter wouldn’t disclose Agrawal’s date of birth, but confirmed he was born later in 1984 than Zuckerberg’s May 14 birthday. Dorsey, at 45, was already among the dozen youngest CEOs in the collection of the largest U.S. companies.