Twitter has banned over 70,000 accounts that “primarily” shared QAnon-associated conspiracy theories in the past three days. the company said on Monday.
“We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm. Given the violent events in Washington, DC, and increased risk of harm, we began permanently suspending thousands of accounts that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content on Friday afternoon,” Twitter said in a Monday blog post.
In many instances, “numerous accounts” were being operated by a single individual, according to the company, and were “primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service.”
As a result of the crackdown on QAnon-promoting accounts, some users will have experienced drops in their follower counts, with some amounting to “thousands” of lost followers, Twitter said.
On Monday, Facebook also announced that it was purging “stop the steal” content from its platform in response to the pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol last week.
“We’ve been allowing robust conversations related to the election outcome and that will continue,” Facebook executive Guy Rosen said in a blog post. “But with continued attempts to organize events against the outcome of the US presidential election that can lead to violence, and use of the term by those involved in Wednesday’s violence in DC, we’re taking this additional step in the lead-up to the inauguration. It may take some time to scale up our enforcement of this new step but we have already removed a significant number of posts.”
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