SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter said on Monday that it had removed more than 70,000 accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory in the past few days, while the company expanded its crackdown on content that could incite violence after barring President Trump from his service this week. last.
Twitter, which carried out the suspensions over the weekend, said it acted to crack down on posts that have “the potential to cause damage offline”. He added that many of the removed users operated multiple QAnon accounts, increasing the total number of accounts removed.
“These accounts were involved in sharing harmful content not associated with QA on a large scale and were mainly dedicated to spreading this conspiracy theory across the service,” said the company in a blog post.
Social media companies rushed to distance themselves from the violent mob attack on the Capitol building last week, which Trump fed into social media posts and public comments. After the turmoil, Twitter and Facebook blocked Trump’s accounts, before finally barring him from his services and cutting off the president’s megaphones.
Other social media platforms, like Snapchat and Reddit, have also moved to limit Trump and the toxic speech that can inspire people to violence in recent days. Since then, Facebook and Twitter have expanded their actions. On Monday, Facebook announced that it would begin removing any content that referred to “Stop the theft,” a rallying cry for Trump supporters who believe the false claim that the election was stolen from Trump.
Twitter said it would also deepen its crackdown on misleading and false information about the presidential election. Users who persistently violate their civic integrity policy, which prohibits them from spreading content that discourages voter participation or deceives about the outcome of an election, would face permanent suspension, Twitter said.
The actions of Facebook and Twitter have been praised by liberals and others, but have also raised questions about the power of companies over online speech.
The QAnon conspiracy theory has been powerful for Mr. Trump. His believers position Mr. Trump as a hero who is trying to eradicate a global elite of Satan-worshiping pedophiles. A woman who invaded the Capitol last week and was shot and killed, Ashli Babbitt, was a QAnon believer.
Although conspiracy theory has infected online for years, social media companies have only changed in recent months to remove content related to it. Last August, Facebook began establishing policies that barred QAnon groups that called for violence, before expanding the action in October, saying it would remove any Instagram group, page or account that openly identified itself with QAnon.
In July, Twitter banned 7,000 QAnon accounts and blocked topics related to the conspiracy theory from appearing in its trending topics. But theories persistently reappeared on Twitter and other social media platforms, leading to online harassment and physical violence.
The elimination of tens of thousands of QAnon accounts, combined with the routine removal of bots and spammers, has caused noticeable fluctuations in the followers count of some Twitter users, the company said.
This took some users – like the former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and a Florida congressman, Matt Gaetz – to speculate that Twitter was secretly isolating them from their followers because of their political beliefs.
After Twitter banned Trump from the platform, some of his supporters called for a protest outside the company’s San Francisco headquarters on Monday. City officials set up barricades and the police set up a guard to prevent disturbances. But their preparations were ultimately unnecessary: the protest attracted only one participant.