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Twitter said on Thursday, 2 April, that it has removed thousands of accounts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Indonesia and Serbia that allegedly took direction from governments or pushed pro-government content.
"We removed 2,541 accounts in an Egypt-based network, known as the El Fagr network," the San Francisco-based tech firm posted in a series of tweets.
"The media group created inauthentic accounts to amplify messaging critical of Iran, Qatar and Turkey. Information we gained externally indicates it was taking direction from the Egyptian government," El Fagr's online managing editor Mina Salah vehemently pushed back.
He said Twitter was effectively censoring the newspaper's content and that journalists were banned from even creating new personal accounts.
Rights groups have accused the conservative kingdom of spying on dissidents and critical online users on Twitter.
The Saudi-linked accounts were run out of the kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, where Twitter's Middle East headquarters is based, as well as Egypt.
Earlier this week, it removed two of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's tweets questioning quarantine measures aimed at containing the novel coronavirus on the grounds that they violated the social network's rules.
(Published in arrangement with PTI.)
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