On Tuesday, Big Tech giant Twitter announced that it had banned approximately 373 accounts for allegedly posting content that “undermined faith in the NATO alliance and its stability,” as reported by Breitbart.
Twitter claimed that the accounts in question were part of “state-linked information operations” that were supposedly linked to the governments of Russia, Iran, and Armenia. Of the 373, 130 were targeted “based on intel provided by the FBI” that claimed the accounts had attempted to “disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 U.S. presidential debate.”
They further claimed that another 69 accounts were “reliably tied to Russian state actors,” and 35 accounts were tied to the Armenian government. The latter group of accounts were allegedly “created in order to advance narratives that were targeting Azerbaijan and were geostrategically favorable to the Armenian government.” Twitter continued by saying that these accounts “engaged in spammy activity to gain followers and further amplify this narrative.”
A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, responded by pointing out that “millions of users” could technically be considered “illegitimate” under the criteria listed by Twitter and the FBI. She pointed to the disproportionate influence of Russian accounts that advocate against the government of President Vladimir Putin, led by jailed dissident Alexei Navalny, pointing out that “Navalny’s supporters…certainly influence the United States and the European Union, given the speed at which anti-Russian sanctions are stamped there at the request of ‘agents of influence.’”