Twitter suspends more than 300 accounts promoting Philippines’ Marcos

|HT|

Twitter Inc. suspended more than 300 accounts reportedly promoting Philippines presidential frontrunner Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., citing a violation of its policies against platform manipulation and spam. The majority of these social media accounts had already been taken down as part of routine actions before news website Rappler’s report on pro-Marcos Twitter handles, the company said. An investigation into the matter is ongoing, it added.

“With the Philippine elections taking place this May, we remain vigilant about identifying and eliminating suspected information campaigns targeting election conversations,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Marcos, who led last month’s presidential preference survey, has a dominant online presence. Independent fact-checker VERA Files said he benefited most from election-related disinformation last year.

“While it is true that there could have been hundreds of Twitter accounts that were suspended, there is no certainty that all of them belong to the supporters of Bongbong Marcos,” his spokesman Vic Rodriguez said in a statement.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)