Twitter Suspends Fake Accounts Pretending To Be Black Trump Supporters

Twitter suspended a group of fake accounts pretending to be Black supporters of President Donald Trump and his re-election campaign. The social media conglomerate said Tuesday the accounts breached its policies on spam and platform manipulation.

Multiple fake accounts posted the same tweet including the phrase: "YES IM BLACK AND IM VOTING FOR TRUMP!!!"

Darren Linvill, the lead researcher for the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub, told The Washington Post “It’s asymmetrical warfare... They don’t have to last long. And they are so cheap to produce that you can get a lot of traction without a whole lot of work. Thank you, Twitter.”

Linvill added on Twitter that trolls "are out there trying to influence our conversations before November."

These fraudulent accounts appeared to use stolen photos of real people, including military veterans and members of law enforcement, in their profile pictures. Collectively, the accounts had 265,000 retweets or Twitter mentions. Some of them had amassed over 10,000 followers.

Linvill told Reuters that most of the accounts were created in 2017, but had become more active in the past two months. He said all the accounts he had been tracking in the group had now been suspended by Twitter, but the damage had already been done.

“It doesn’t matter if Twitter’s shutting you down in four days, they’ve already had their impact,” Linvill said.

Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy said Twitter already had taken down some of the network identified by Linvill for violating rules against platform manipulation and spam.

“Our teams are working diligently to investigate this activity and will take action in line with the Twitter Rules if Tweets are found to be in violation,” Kennedy said in a statement.

Twitter has yet to say how many accounts it has suspended or who is behind them.

Twitter notes on its website that it does not allow users to "to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people's experience on Twitter." The news comes just weeks before the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 3. Only 10% of Black voters support President Trump, FiveThirtyEight reported.