Twitter has deleted more than 10,000 bot accounts which it says were trying to persuade people not to vote in the upcoming US midterm elections.

Twitter did not provide any details on what types of messages the bots were sending, but according to Reuters, the accounts had posed as Democrats and urged key demographics not to vote, arguing, for example, that Democratic men should not vote as this would drown out the voices of women.

A spokesman for the company said it had taken “action on relevant accounts and activity on Twitter”. It had removed the posts between September and October.

Late on Friday, Twitter confirmed that it had first been alerted to the posts by the Democratic Party, which has set up its own system for spotting malicious accounts using technology developed by the University of Indiana.

Although Twitter has its own technology for spotting spam and bot accounts, and then deleting them, the Democrats are hoping that, by using their own system, they can respond quicker should misinformation campaigns start spreading in the run up to next Tuesday’s elections.

The Democratic National Committee did not respond to requests for comment.