Twitter announces broad crackdown on QAnon accounts and content

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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
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

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​

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.

Numerous QAnon believers have won Republican primary races and will be on local, state and congressional ballotsin November.

In May 2019, following numerous incidents of real-world violence, the FBI identified QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat
 
Civilisations that the gods wish to destroy they first make mad, as Sophocles didn’t quite say.
 
I thought of them as LARP’ers all this time. Best ignored.
But now the Streisand Effect is in play. And will have to play out.
Twitter should probably have done this by stealth and more slowly.

That said, those Chrissy Teigen tweets are dang creepy. Doesn’t matter what she did to delete them, the Internet is forever if one is prominent enough.
 
Zzyzx_Road said:
Twitter should probably have done this by stealth and more slowly.
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I don’t know, with the claims of “shadow banning” and other accusations of nefarious actions they might be motivated to be open and upfront about it. There are multiple factors they may be balancing.
 
I have no idea what QAnon is. Guess I’ll have to go look it up now.

Edited to add, oh, I see the first post explained it. Thanks for that.

If the QAnon believers are so “numerous” then how come I haven’t heard about them till now? I don’t exactly live under a rock. I don’t have Twitter though, I think it’s a waste of time. Does one have to have Twitter to see this gunk?
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
f the QAnon believers are so “numerous” then how come I haven’t heard about them till now?
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If you are like me, and many other people, you may have stopped listening to them as soon as they go off into some conspiracy theory and just never assigned a group identity to them.
 
Yeah, my eyes glaze over the minute I hear certain words like “Deep state”.

I vaguely remember around the time of the 2016 Inauguration, some pizza shop in upper Northwest DC was getting harassed by some crazy group who thought the Democrats were meeting in the basement of the shop where there was a bunch of child pornography. One of the nuts went into the store with an open carry which of course scared the store’s regular clietele to death. Sounds like the same group.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
I vaguely remember around the time of the 2016 Inauguration, some pizza shop in upper Northwest DC was getting harassed by some crazy group who thought the Democrats were meeting in the basement of the shop where there was a bunch of child pornography. One of the nuts went into the store with an open carry which of course scared the store’s regular clietele to death. Sounds like the same group.
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Yep! Now you’ve got a name for them. The sooner Twitter shuts that nonsense down the better.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
I vaguely remember around the time of the 2016 Inauguration, some pizza shop in upper Northwest DC was getting harassed by some crazy group who thought the Democrats were meeting in the basement of the shop where there was a bunch of child pornography. One of the nuts went into the store with an open carry which of course scared the store’s regular clietele to death.
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And as I recall, it turned out the place didn’t even have a basement! 🤣
 
Yeah, I looked this up and I had forgotten the nut actually fired some shots in the place. The employees had already been getting death threats so they thought they were goners.

I remember my husband and I went to eat there a few weeks later in order to be supportive (and to see what all the fuss was about). The pizza was very good but the service was slow, and because it was around the time of the Women’s March, there were dozens of p-hatters in there, in their hats.
 
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