Twitter deletes 10,000 voter suppression accounts

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Twitter has deleted over 10,000 accounts that were discouraging people from voting in the upcoming midterm election.

The accounts were created to appears as though they were from Democrats even if they weren’t, which led the party to flag the tweets to the microblogging platform, according to Reuters.

The removals happened between September and October.

“We took action on relevant accounts and activity on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesman said in an email.

The number of accounts is small compared to the millions it has deleted linked to misinformation, but still show that a not insignificant number of accounts engage in voter suppression tactics on Twitter's platform.

During the 2016 election, social media accounts pumped out significant amounts of political disinformation, including efforts to suppress votes by spreading lies about issues and fake advertisements about numbers that people could use to text in their votes.

Twitter and Facebook have taken steps to try to curb political misinformation across their platforms in advance of the 2018 midterms, to avoid a repeat of rampant hoaxes on their platform during the 2016 election.

If someone's voting decisions can be controlled via twitter, they shouldn't be voting.