Following the sad events of the US Capitol riots, Twitter has now blocked around 70,000 user accounts. They all had links to QAnon conspiracy theory.
According to The Independent, Twitter blocked nearly 70,000 accounts associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. The big step came after the unexpected events of the US Capitol riots last week.
On Tuesday, the social media company said it’s taking action against online account activity “that has the potential to lead to offline harm.”
It clearly mentioned the reason to be the US Capitol’s insurrection by the mob involving Trump supporters.
Twitter taking big actions against Trump supporters
Speaking in detail, the company said that it found many instances of multiple accounts by just one individual. Thus, it also increased the total number of affected user accounts.
“These accounts were engaged in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service,” Twitter said.
This theory actually tries to tell a false belief regarding Mr. Trump, that he is actually waging a secret campaign against “deep state” enemies and a child trafficking ring. And also, that cannibals and other groups of people run it.
When it comes to strict actions, then the social network began this last Friday itself. It started blocking suspicious and “harmful” QAnon profiles. In addition to that, it has already banned Donald Trump from his official social media account. He faced a similar fate in terms of his Facebook and Instagram profiles as well.
Social media is getting restricted to far-right groups
Apart from the ongoing ban on many accounts, those related to Mr. Trump and far-right groups face big restrictions. Recently, this week, the Parler app saw a complete removal from the internet following the US Capitol violence. Users of the social media platform are said to be involved in the events of Washington, D.C.
They posted threats and violent posts on the portal. Following this, Amazon’s AWS division pulled its support from the platform on Jan. 11th.
Coming back to Twitter, it has also begun restricting posts that violate its civic integrity policy. It’s part of the new enforcement measures against all the accounts that try to create chaos. And it involves preventing the spread of likes, retweets, and replies associated with any harmful tweet.
Finally, the major platforms are now taking action against all online activities, which result in real-life violent situations. But it’s mostly in terms of politics-based scenarios. There are many other issues that they need to look upon. For example, online bullying through unwanted content and speech and fake news/agendas on multiple topics is serious. Hopefully, they will be addressed in the future by bringing new rules and policies for user profiles.
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