Twitter has taken down a network of spam accounts that were tweeting out anti-Joe Biden conspiracy theories on Election Day, NBC News reports.
The spam network is composed of about 150 accounts. Twitter said the accounts violated its policies on “spam and platform manipulation,” and coordination between accounts to violate Twitter rules, Twitter told NBC News’s Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny.
The spam network was detected by the media monitoring group Alethea, which had been monitoring disinformation campaigns that were coordinated on the messaging platforms Discord and WhatsApp.
Alethea said the accounts published identical tweets pushing anti-Biden and anti-China conspiracy theories to voters in swing states, Spanish-speaking voters, and right-wing media consumers in the U.S.
The disinformation campaign sought to send people from mainstream platforms such as Twitter and YouTube to right-wing fringe sites like Parler and other fake news sites operated by Gou Media, Alethea found.
Guo Media is owned by a billionaire Chinese dissident named Guo Wengui, who is still wanted in China for bribery and other crimes. Gou is also a friend and associate of ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon, NBC News reports.
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