Twitter took down two fake accounts that were spreading information about black voters abandoning the Democratic Party amid months of unrest.
The removed accounts were perceived to have been run by black voters, with tweets that often went viral.
One of the accounts, @WentDemToRep, got 11,000 retweets on a tweet that said they were a lifelong Democrat who was pushed to vote Republican by the Black Lives Matter movement, according to NBC News.
The tweet was posted shortly after the creation of the account on Tuesday.
Two other accounts tagged by the bot, @PeterGammo and @KRon619, were also suspended on Tuesday.
A tweet by @KRon619 read the user was a Democrat their entire life until July and was retweeted over 12,000 times. Other posts urging black, brown, and white people to leave the Democratic Party got over 6,000 retweets, and others attacking “the Democrat media” and protesters in cities got over 12,000 retweets.
The three suspended accounts broke the social media giant’s policies on spam and for engaging in “specifically, artificially manipulative behavior.”
The accounts used images of black men as their profile pictures, including a photo stolen from the Instagram page of Nelis Joustra, who tried to get the account removed.
“I called my mom and asked her what to do because I was stressing out,” Joustra said. “The only thing I could do was to report the account and tweet some tweets to tell people that I’m not the person who owns the account and that they’re using me on the profile picture without asking me.”
Twitter previously said it would crack down on disinformation as the 2020 election draws closer.
