Twitter suspends 61 accounts aiming fake news at the Israeli public
Social media site takes further action against profiles spreading false information, bringing the total of suspensions to 343 since the elections were announced
Twitter suspended 61 accounts linked to foreign fake news manipulation campaigns aimed at the Israeli public.
This is a total of 343 accounts suspended by Twitter since Israeli elections were announced last month, Elad Ratson of Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry tweeted on Monday. Ratson is an Israeli diplomat based in London and the ministry’s director of Research and Development.
The new group of 61 accounts had a total of more than 28,000 followers, and most of them were in English.
Meanwhile, Facebook announced in a statement on Monday that it would launch “additional tools to help prevent foreign interference and make political and issue advertising on Facebook more transparent.” Advertisers will need to be authorised to purchase political ads; Facebook will give people more information about ads related to politics and issues; and it will create a publicly searchable library of these ads for up to seven years, the statement said.
The new tools will be launched in March, in the last weeks of Israel’s election campaign, with a global rollout planned for June.
On Sunday, the Speaker of Israel’s Knesset, Yuli Edelstein, rejected a request by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, to which Israel belongs, to monitor the national election set for April 9, the Times of Israel reported. The interparliamentary group made up of 26 European, North African and Middle Eastern parliaments, noted that foreign and local groups had threatened to attempt to influence the elections, mostly on-line, according to the report.
Edelstein called the request “an unparalleled expression of arrogance.”
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