Twitter
Banned
GovernmentTwitter announced the permanent removal of 373 “state-affiliated” accounts that they attributed to Armenia, Russia and Iran:
The networks we are disclosing relate to independent, state-affiliated information operations that we have attributed to Armenia, Russia and a previously disclosed network from Iran.
Once our investigations were complete, the 373 associated accounts across the four networks were permanently suspended from Twitter for violations of our platform manipulation policies.
The Iranian accounts that were removed were the final part of Twitter’s enforcement action that started back in October of 2020 when they initially removed 130 accounts attributed to Iran that they claimed were attempting to “disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 US Presidential Debate” based on a tip from the FBI. However, Twitter’s reasoning behind this recent removal of Armenian and Russian accounts was due to those accounts being opposed to certain NATO interests:
[…] we investigated and removed 35 accounts that had ties to the Government of Armenia. These accounts were created in order to advance narratives that were targeting Azerbaijan and were geostrategically favorable to the Armenian government. In some cases, the fake accounts purported to represent government and political figures in Azerbaijan, as well as news entities claiming to operate in Azerbaijan.
[…] removed a network of 69 fake accounts that can be reliably tied to Russian state actors. A number of these accounts amplified narratives that were aligned with the Russian government, while another subset of the network focused on undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.
In the case of the Armenian accounts, Twitter forgot to include the full context regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh war that just took place between Azerbaijan and Armenia where NATO-backed Turkey helped Azerbaijan take control the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Journalist Max Blumenthal did a segment on Jimmy Dore’s show where he summarized the situation very well:
This is further confirmation of Twitter acting as a US regime propaganda site, […]. Armenians were massacred with help from NATO. Basically, here was just a war in the Nagorno-Karabakh region started by Azerbaijan. It’s like what you would call contested territory. Most of the population there is Armenian. They consider it Armenia, and Azerbaijan violated a cease-fire, as far as I know, to attack it, to try to take it as part of Azerbaijan, they were the stronger military party, and who were they supported by? Erdoğan’s Turkey, which is a member of NATO. He brought in drones, military intelligence support, and thousands of Turkish mercenaries known as the TFSA, the Turkish Free Syrian Army. […] he sent them over to fight in Nagorno-Karabakh, known as Artsakh by Armenians, and they won that little war that they started with NATO backing. And Armenia, which has suffered a genocide by the hands of Turkey, is now being targeted on Twitter along with these other states that NATO is targeting. […] This is information warfare. Twitter is intervening on behalf of NATO because it’s being run by pro-NATO or directly NATO forces. […] they don’t want our faith in NATO to be undermined. They don’t want us to think about what NATO even is or why it even exists after the Cold War. It exists to start another Cold War, to justify its own existence and its budget […].