Twitter has removed more than two dozen fake accounts posing as Black supporters of President Donald Trump that had amassed a sizable following.
The Washington Post first reported on the accounts, which included one profile, @CopJrCliff, that had gained more than 24,000 followers over just six days while only tweeting eight times. The account showed an image of a Black police officer and Trump and said “VOTE REPUBLICAN.”
Many of the accounts in the network retweeted the same thing, according to Darren Linvill, a Clemson University social media researcher who spoke to the Post about them. Some of the accounts tweeted “YES IM BLACK AND IM VOTING FOR TRUMP,” as Linvill noted on Twitter.
According to the Post, the network of accounts used pictures of Black people from news reports and other sources and claimed to be police officers, veterans, and other occupations.
Linvill wrote on Twitter that the network wasn’t only pretending to be Black Trump supporters, but also had accounts masquerading as a white police officer in Philadelphia, Nancy Pelosi’s hairstylist, and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Overall, the network of accounts had more than 265,000 retweets or mentions on Twitter, with a few of them having more than 10,000 followers. Linvill told Reuters that most of the accounts were created in 2017, but only recently became active.
Twitter told CNBC the company had “taken action” on some of the accounts for violating its policies about platform manipulation and spam.
You can read all of the Washington Post report here.
