Key sentence:
- Twitter claimed that the accounts were suspended for breaching its “coordination” policy.
- SVNewsAlerts, a few of those suspended, had more than 78,000 followers on Twitter.
- It pointed to Electoral bribery charges and drew attention to the protests and speeches of Republican President Donald Trump.
- Twitter applied fact-checking labels from the @PhillyGOP handle.
- A Trump poll-watcher has been seen being turned away from a platform in one video widely circulated by conservative audiences.
On Tuesday, Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc suspended many newly established right-leaning news accounts posting voter information for breaching their policies in the highly contested U.S. election.
Twitter claimed that the accounts were suspended for breaching its “coordination” policy, posting similar content while appearing separate or engaging in many other covertly automated behaviour.
For inauthentic behaviour, Facebook suspended them.SVNewsAlerts, a few of those suspended, had more than 78,000 followers on Twitter, after adding more than 10,000 in the previous week.
The study also warned of election-related turmoil and highlighted voting safety and efficiency problems. It pointed to Electoral bribery charges and drew attention to the protests and speeches of Republican President Donald Trump.
FJNewsReporter, Crisis-Intel, and Faytuks were among the other accounts suspended by Twitter.
There were more than 20,000 followers on a Facebook page that was removed on Tuesday afternoon, also called SVNewsAlerts. Facebook refused further comment.
False or exaggerated claims of voting irregularities and vote delays spread for the day on social media, supported in some cases by Republican accounts as well as online publications.
Also, the FBI and the New York Attorney General have said that they are looking into a rash of suspicious robocalls telling people to stay home in several battleground states, which were published.
According to social intelligence company Zignal Labs, the hashtag # StopTheSteal spiked from a few hundred mentions to more than 2000 mentions over a 15-minute span in the morning.
In Pennsylvania, one of the most fiercely contested states, Zignal said false rumours about closed polling stations and disproportionately long queues in Republican-leaning areas earned more than 33,000 mentions on Twitter.
Twitter applied fact-checking labels from the @PhillyGOP handle, which was one of those using #StopTheSteal, to several tweets. The Republican Party of Philadelphia did not respond immediately to a Reuters request for comment upon these Twitter labels.
“In Pennsylvania, the far-right sites Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit also published articles saying” the steal is on “that racked up thousands of Facebook and Twitter posts.
A Trump poll-watcher has been seen being turned away from a platform in one video widely circulated by conservative audiences.
Philadelphia officials investigated and found that under an outdated statute, which required permission to enter a particular polling place, the man had been erroneously barred. He was accepted then. On Twitter, the video has been viewed 2.4 million times.
According to researchers at disinformation monitoring company Alethea Party, members of the QAnon conspiracy movement have disseminated the Pennsylvania news.
