Twitter closes down 7,340 Erdoğan-backed troll accounts

One of the world's largest social media platform, Twitter, closed 7,340 Turkish accounts as they violated their policies.

Twitter reported that these accounts were found to be linked to the youth activities of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rules with an iron fist.

In a statement, Twitter explained that thousands of accounts from Turkey, China and Russia had their accounts removed from the platform.

The statement said "Based on our analysis of the network’s technical indicators and account behaviours, the collection of fake and compromised accounts was being used to amplify political narratives favourable to the AK Parti, and demonstrated strong support for President Erdogan. We’re disclosing 7,340 accounts to the archive today."

Twitter said that the research on the identification of these accounts was done in conjunction with the Australian Strategy Policy Institute (ASPI) and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO).

In the statement, "As a result, the network we’re disclosing today includes several compromised accounts associated with organisations critical of President Erdogan and the Turkish Government. These compromised accounts have been repeated targets of account hacking and takeover efforts by the state actors identified above. The broader network was also used for commercial activities, such as cryptocurrency-related spam."

Fahrettin Altun, one of the most infamous propagandist's in Turkey and the Communications Director of Turkey, released a statement through his Twitter.

Despite it being well established that the infamous AK Trolls are state-funded, Altun denied the allegations and said that claim "that they were single-handedly managed by a central authority are untrue."

"Altun even made an indirect threat to Twitter saying "we would like to remind this company of the eventual fate of a number of organizations, which attempted to take similar steps in the past," without giving further details.