Twitter is taking action in cracking down accounts associated with QAnon.
What We Know:
- Twitter announced that they will take action with the QAnon conspiracy theory postings all over Twitter, including banning the thousands of accounts that are associated with it. They also said they will cease recommending any QAnon content and will block websites associated with it from being shared.
- QAnon is an unfounded conspiracy theory, which began in October 2017 by an anonymous user on a message board. It believes that the Trump campaign and Russia investigation is President Donald Trump secretly investigating “global elites” and that he is planning on arresting celebrities and top politicians for corruption and child abuse.
- QAnon followers and influencers are known to make wild accusations from any information. For example, a Twitter user pointed out the fact that Wayfair’s cabinets were named after girls, leading followers to assume that the furniture store is a part of some child trafficking ring, linking the expensive pieces of furniture with the female names and cases of missing children in the US with the same names.
- QAnon caused a school fundraiser in California to be canceled because conspiracy theorists spread false claims that James Comey was going to cause a terror attack on the event after Comey joined in on the #FiveJobsIveHad Twitter challenge, which was harmless. But authorities were concerned that QAnon followers would attend.
- And because the conspiracy theorists can cause potential harm, Twitter will be permanently suspending accounts that are “engaged in violations of [their] multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension”.
- In recent weeks, more than 7,000 accounts have been removed for violating Twitter’s policies and there may be more 150,000 accounts removed as well.
Last year, the FBI issued a warning about QAnon and its followers and claimed it to be a potential domestic extremist threat.
