The news of propaganda campaigns organised and sponsored by the state has taken over the internet like a flame. Tumblr has taken an initiative by speaking out against it. In one of the blog posts an announcement was made by the concerned authorities looking after social network which stated that they will be undertaking certain actions to lessen the interference of political conversation on its platform. They have decided to put down certain restrictions on the political conversation on their social media platform.
Tumblr has been constantly working on identifying the fake accounts and they have successfully found 84 Tumblr accounts which are linked to some Russia Internet Research Agency and they were the one who participated in the Tumble fake news and ad campaigns during the elections held in 2016.
Tumblr has established a process wherein they will be sending an e-mail to all the ones who have liked, reblogged, replied to or followed an IRA linked account. On receiving the email it is their choice if they wish to delete the post or not.
Tumblr has left this decision on the mail receiver as they are the ones who have created the chain of reblogging on Tumblr. This reblogging is a great challenge before Tumblr as it is involving a lot of false and incideniary claims in the IRA-linked original posts. Tumblr has decided on not to remove posts on their own without the consent of the users the one who has posted it as that will restrict the right of free speech of the users and also they wish to avoid all the disruption between them and their users.
The company has decided to maintain the transparency and has well communicated all the details to their users. They have decided to maintain a public record of IRA-linked usernames.
Tumblr has also stated that they will be soon terminating some of the accounts in future. The accounts will be terminated if they are found promoting disinformation campaigns and also if they alert law enforcement of their identities. Due to much manipulation of the conversation and also knowing about the disinformation and propaganda accounts, it becomes difficult for the users to operate their account with an ease and comfort.
