Moscow’s lawsuits against five social media giants for not removing calls to join government-banned rallies from their platforms are part of a new wave of censorship in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, experts said on Wednesday.

Twitter decided on Thursday to delete some 20,000 fake accounts linked to the governments of several countries - including more than 8,000 to the one in Serbia - stressing that their activity violated Twitter’s policies in constituting a “targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation.”

The man who in 2014 claimed to be a Spanish flight controller and blamed Ukraine for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, turns out to be a petty criminal who says he was paid to launch the hoax, a journalist investigation revealed on Wednesday.