of this conspiracy theory across the service". The rioters that broke into US Capitol Hill included a large amount of QAnon followers. Malicious and fake accounts Between January and late July 2017, Twitter had identified and shut down over 7,000 fake accounts created by Iranian influence operations. In May 2018, in response to scrutiny over the misuse of Twitter by those seeking to maliciously influence elections, Twitter announced that it would partner with the nonprofit organization Ballotpedia to add special labels verifying the authenticity of political candidates running for election in the U.S. In December 2019, Twitter removed 5,929 accounts for violating their manipulation policies. The company investigated and attributed these accounts to a single state-run information operation, which originated in Saudi Arabia. The accounts were reported to be a part of a larger group of 88,000 accounts engaged in spammy behavior. However, Twitter did not disclose all of them as some could possibly be legitimate accounts taken over through hacking. In March 2021, Twitter suspended around 3,500 fake accounts that were running a campaign to influence the American audience, after the US intelligence officials concluded that the assassination of The Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi was "approved" by the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. These Saudi accounts were working in two languages, English and Arabic, to influence public opinion around the issue. Many accounts commented directly on the tweets of US-based media houses, including The Post, CNN, CBS News and The Los Angeles Times. Twitter was unable to identify the source of the influence campaign. , the top four countries spreading state-linked Twitter misinformation are Russia, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Twitter bots A Twitter bot is a computer program that can automatically tweet, retweet, and follow other accounts. Twitter's open application programming interface and the availability of cloud servers make it possible for Twitter bots to exist within the social networking site. Benign Twitter bots may generate creative content and relevant product updates whereas malicious bots can make unpopular people seem popular, push irrelevant products on users and spread misinformation, spam or slander. Bots amass significant influence and have been noted to sway elections, influence the stock market, public appeal, and attack governments. , Twitter said there were 20 million fake accounts on Twitter, representing less than 5% of active users. A 2020 estimate put the figure at 15% of all accounts or around 48 million accounts.