On Friday, Twitter disclosed 7340 Turkish accounts on Twitter.
According to “Twitter Safety” every account and piece of content associated with these accounts had been permanently removed from the service.
The relevant data was also shared with two leading research partners: Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and Stanford Internet Observatory.
Detected in early 2020, a network of accounts were employing coordinated inauthentic activity which was primarily targeting domestic audiences within Turkey.
Based on Twitters analysis which monitored the accounts behaviours and technical indicators, the collection of fake and compromised accounts was being used to amplify political narratives favourable to the AK party and strong support for President Erdogan.
Technical signals point to the network being associated with the youth wing of the party and a centralised network that maintained a significant number of compromised accounts.
As a result, Twitter announced that the network they were 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.
Since the Military Agreement signed between Turkey and Libya’s GNA which was approved by the Turkish parliament back in January 2020, media analysts have registered a large Pro-Erdogan media campaign backing his increased support of the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) which has included UAV drones, armoured vehicles and thousands of mercenaries.