Twitter yanks off 4,779 accounts linked to Iranian govt

Twitter said Thursday it has removed 4,779 accounts linked to the Iranian government and will add more data from account take-downs to a public database.

That includes content from four fake accounts that Twitter removed that were tied to a Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency along with the take-downs of 130 accounts tied to Spain and Venezuela.

The company released the database in October 2018, and it contains more than 30 million tweets and 1 terabyte of media.

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“By making this data open and accessible, we seek to empower researchers, journalists, governments, and members of the public to deepen their understanding of critical issues impacting the integrity of public conversation online, particularly around elections,” Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth said in a blog post.

Roth doesn’t say in the post how the company determined that the thousands of accounts were tied to the Iranian government.

CNET reached out to the Iranian government in an e-mail but didn’t receive a response.

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