Mark Thompson
Sep 2, 20201 min
Twitter’s Trending Topics feature was been reorganized so it leads to less infusion of fake news stories. The feature now includes explanatory tweets so users know more about the stories before they retweet them. Twitter has become more aggressive in combatting fake news. Its policies, called platform manipulation, are leading to revoked priviledges for thousands of fake accounts, whose aims are for mass postings of conspiriacy and political news. In late July, Twitter took down some 150,000 fake accounts that were sourced to QAnon that promoted various conspiracy theories about the Democrats. Twitter also shut down 170,000 accounts linked to the Chinese government that created narratives favorable to their points of view on Hong Kong, Covid-19, etc. Commercial outfits, like Graphika, have also worked to disarm GRM (Russia’s intelligence agency). Russia’s election interference campaign, called Secondary Infektion, was tracked by Graphika. See https://secondaryinfektion.org/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/tech/twitter-manipulation-account-removal/index.html