Twitter permanently suspends Marjorie Taylor
Greene’s personal account
Georgia Republican’s Covid misinformation violation
prompts move, after being issued a ‘fourth strike’ in August
Martin
Pengelly in New York and agencies
@MartinPengelly
Sun 2 Jan
2022 17.42 GMT
The
personal Twitter account of the Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie
Taylor Greene has been permanently suspended, for violating policies on
misinformation about Covid-19.
Action
against Greene on Sunday came under the “strike” system Twitter launched last
March, which uses artificial intelligence to identify posts about the
coronavirus misleading enough to cause harm.
Two or
three strikes earn a 12-hour account lock, four strikes prompt a weeklong
suspension and five or more can get an account permanently removed.
Twitter had
previously suspended Greene’s personal account for periods ranging from 12
hours to a week.
Greene was
issued a “fourth strike” this summer, for saying vaccines were failing.
“We’ve been
clear that … we will permanently suspend accounts for repeated violations of
the policy,” a Twitter spokeswoman said on Sunday.
The
congresswoman’s official account remains active.
The
Republican is a determined controversialist and political extremist who courts
controversy and confrontation.
She has
regularly been fined for refusing to follow Covid guidelines in Congress,
including those regarding mask-wearing on the House floor.
In a
statement on Sunday, Greene called Twitter “an enemy to America” and said it
could not “handle the truth”.
She also
accused Twitter of seeking “a communist revolution” and said: “Social media
platforms can’t stop the truth from being spread far and wide. Big tech can’t
stop the truth. Communist Democrats can’t stop the truth. I stand with the
truth and the people. We will overcome.”
Greene said
her account was suspended after tweeting statistics from the Vaccine Adverse
Event Reporting System, a government database which includes unverified raw
data.
More than
825,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the US, out of a caseload of nearly
55m. Many states are experiencing a surge of cases and consequent disruption to
everyday life caused by the highly infectious Omicron variant.
Resistance
to vaccinations and other public health measures has fueled both the pandemic
and political tensions around it. Greene has become a prominent voice among
far-right Republicans stoking such tensions in Congress and around the country.
Shortly
before her weeklong suspension from Twitter, she claimed in a tweet that the
virus was “not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65”. According to
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), people under 65 account
for nearly 250,000 of US deaths involving Covid-19.
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