Twitter announced a broad crackdown on accounts and content related to the QAnon conspiracy theory on Tuesday, citing its policies against “behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm”.
The company said it would block URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on the platform, and would no longer recommend content and accounts associated with QAnon or highlight them in search and conversations. These restrictions will affect approximately 150,000 accounts, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed. NBC News first reported the crackdown.
“These accounts are engaging in behavior that is designed to further the spread of content that has resulted in clear and well-documented informational, physical, societal and psychological offline harm,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “We have been monitoring the situation closely and determined that additional action is now required pursuant to the Twitter rules against our policies on spam and platform manipulation as well as abusive behavior.”
Twitter asked that its spokesperson not be named due to the threat of harassment.
QAnon is a baseless internet conspiracy theory whose followers believe that Donald Trump is waging a secret battle against a powerful deep state cabal of Democrats and celebrities engaged in pedophilia and sex trafficking. The small community of QAnon believers has had an outsize impact on political discourse, attracting attention through targeted harassment campaigns and “brigading” social media platforms to make things trend.
In recent weeks, QAnon followers on Twitter have targeted model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen, as well as the furniture company Wayfair. Twitter banned more than 7,000 QAnon accounts in recent weeks for violations of its rules, a Twitter spokesperson said.
More details soon…
source https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/21/twitter-broad-crackdown-qanon-accounts-content
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