Twitter Will Suspend Accounts Tweeting About Conspiracy Theory Group QAnon

Twitter said it would not serve content and accounts associated with QAnon in trends and recommendations.

By Reuters | Updated: 22 July 2020 12:25 IST

Twitter Will Suspend Accounts Tweeting About Conspiracy Theory Group QAnon

More than 7,000 accounts have been removed in the last few weeks for violating Twitter's rules

Highlights

The suspension is expected to impact about 150,000 accounts globally
Twitter announced the change on its Twitter Safety page
Earlier this year, Facebook removed a network of accounts linked to QAnon

Twitter said on Tuesday it would permanently suspend accounts that violate its policies while tweeting about QAnon, a fringe group that claims "deep-state" traitors are plotting against President Donald Trump.

Twitter, which announced the change on its Twitter Safety page, said it would not serve content and accounts associated with QAnon in trends and recommendations, and would block URLs associated with the group from being shared on the platform. The suspension, which will be rolled out this week, is expected to impact about 150,000 accounts globally, Twitter said. It said that more than 7,000 accounts have been removed in the last several weeks for violating the company's rules against spam, platform manipulation and ban evasion.

We've been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm. In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called ‘QAnon' activity across the service.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) July 22, 2020

The suspensions will be applied to accounts "engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension — something we've seen more of in recent weeks," Twitter said.

In online conspiracies, the term "deep-state" is used to refer to a combination of elites from the intelligence, political, business, and entertainment fields, with QAnon's theories claiming that the "deep-state" is at a secret war with Trump.

QAnon has also claimed that Democratic Party members are behind international crime rings. The group's content has spread widely on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube. Earlier this year, Facebook removed a US network of fake accounts linked to QAnon.

Last year, the FBI issued a warning about "conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists" and designated QAnon as a potential domestic extremist threat.

© Thomson Reuters 2020

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