Twitter announces broad crackdown on QAnon
accounts and content
The company’s restrictions, which will affect about
150,000 accounts, will include blocking URLs and not recommending content
Julia
Carrie Wong
@juliacarriew
Published
onWed 22 Jul 2020 03.04 BST
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 May
2019, following numerous incidents of real-world violence, the FBI identified
QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat.
Joan
Donovan, the research director for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, described
Twitter’s action as a “big deal”. “The Q keyword has brought together a
networked faction, aided by automation, that continuously spreads
misinformation and inspires dangerous behaviors,” she tweeted in response to
the news. “Twitter is late out the gate. Facebook and YouTube aren’t even in
the race.”
In recent
weeks, QAnon followers on Twitter have targeted the 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.
QAnon is
based on the interpretation of online messages posted by an anonymous figure –
“Q” – who claims to have inside knowledge of the workings of the “deep state”.
Q’s lurid tale of child exploitation and elite corruption has drawn followers
into a kind of digital scavenger hunt that frequently results in intense
harassment of perceived enemies or villains.
Followers
participate in QAnon in different ways across multiple internet platforms. Q
followers congregate in Facebook groups or Discord chats to discuss posts, and
QAnon influencers will expound on the theories to large audiences on YouTube.
(Reddit enacted a blanket ban of QAnon in 2018, citing its policies against
harassment, doxxing and incitement to violence. )
Twitter is
particularly useful to QAnon followers as a site for targeted harassment of
individuals as well as for media manipulation campaigns.
Teigen, who
has more than 13.1m followers on Twitter, has been targeted with harassment for
years by QAnon followers baselessly accusing her of child abuse. She had spoken
out in recent weeks about the intensity and toll of the harassment, tweeting:
“If twitter doesn’t do something about this *actually scary* harassment, I am
gonna have to go.
“You don’t
have a ‘right’ to coordinate attacks and make death threats,” she tweeted
Tuesday in response to the crackdown. “It is not an ‘opinion’ to call people
pedophiles who rape and eat children.”
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