Twitter has suspended dozens of suspicious Hebrew-language accounts run by a controversial Chinese religious group ahead of Israel’s national elections, BuzzFeed News has learned. It’s at least the second such suspension in the run-up to the elections, but the company is saying little about what actions it took or why. Nor is it clear what the religious group’s goals were before Twitter’s enforcement actions.

The accounts are affiliated with the Church of Almighty God (CAG), a Christian sect that’s banned in China and which believes that Jesus Christ has been reincarnated as a Chinese woman currently living in Queens, New York.

In the months leading up to the April 9 election, Twitter suspended dozens of CAG-affiliated accounts, some of which were amplifying political messages for right-wing politicians, according to a source with knowledge of the removals. None of the profiles promoted any messages favoring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The vast majority of the content from the accounts, which posted in Hebrew and appeared to use fake names, was focused on religion.

The CAG-affiliated Twitter accounts were among hundreds flagged as suspicious, based on initial work done by Noam Rotem and Yuval Adam, two Israeli researchers who study social media manipulation. Other volunteer hacktivists did a more in-depth analysis of the profiles to determine the organization responsible for coordinating the accounts’ activities.

The accounts were flagged due to what appeared to be coordinated amplification of content, according to the source, who is familiar with how the CAG accounts were brought to Twitter’s attention, and asked for anonymity to protect ongoing research.

The source said in a message that the accounts caught the attention of researchers after they turned up in searches “programmed to look for tweets in Hebrew (to influence Hebrew speakers) generated by account clusters outside Israel.”

“Essentially, a queen bee generates the narrative and worker bees generate interactions with those narratives to spread it further or to give it greater credibility,” the source said.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to speak on the record, and would not comment on how the accounts were flagged to the company or say how many accounts were removed. The spokesperson would only say the accounts were suspended due to spam violations.

This is the second time Twitter has refused to disclose details about accounts it suspended in Israel ahead of the election, which raises questions about the company’s commitment to transparency around removing accounts during global political events.

On March 31, the New York Times and Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Rotem and Adam, the independent social media researchers, had identified a network of hundreds of accounts working together to spread disinformation about Benny Gantz, the leader of the opposition Blue and White Party, and to promote Netanyahu’s Likud Party. Gantz is Netanyahu's main challenger.

Netanyahu said he and his party were not controlling the accounts, and that they were not "fake" or bots. Rotem and Adam's report didn't claim the network was using bots.

“There are real accounts in that system, and there are real people. We did not say anywhere that there were bots, but that there are a group of accounts working together to promote an agenda,” Adam told the Washington Post.

Netanyahu soon appeared at a press conference with Giora Ezra, an Israeli real estate agent who runs a pro-Netanyahu Twitter account, "Captain George," cited in the report about the pro-Likud network. “As you can see, I’m not a bot,” Ezra said.