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Twitter Suspends Some Accounts Who Spread Phrase ‘I Hired Donald Trump to Fire People Like Yovanovitch’

The phrase “I Hired Donald Trump to Fire People Like Yovanovitch” trended on Twitter as the former ambassador to Ukraine testified.

Twitter suspended a number of accounts that tweeted the phrase “I hired Donald Trump to fire people like Yovanovitch” while former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified before Congress Friday, BuzzFeed News reports. The phrase reportedly trended on Twitter Friday morning as Yovanovitch spoke before the House Intelligence Committee as part of the Trump impeachment inquiry, but it seems the tweets spread at a rate similar to coordinated inauthentic behavior on the platform. The phrase appears to have been first tweeted out by a real pro-Trump influencer, but it then appeared in at least 7,320 tweets within 45 minutes. Eighty-three accounts reportedly tweeted or retweeted the phrase over 10 times each. Twitter told the website they were looking into the matter, and several of the accounts were subsequently suspended. The phrase has also reportedly appeared in YouTube, 4chan, and Facebook posts.