“We have been clear that we will take firm action to enforce the law on behavior that has the potential to cause harm offline,” the Twitter security team said Tuesday night in a tweet. “In line with this approach, this week we are taking more action on so-called ‘QAnon’ activity across the service.”
QAnon started out as a unique conspiracy theory. But his followers now act more like a virtual cult, largely worshiping and believing any misinformation that the conspiracy community spins.
His main conspiracy theories claim that dozens of A-list politicians and celebrities work closely with governments around the world to get involved in child sexual abuse. Followers also believe there is a “deep state” effort to annihilate President Donald Trump.
“We will permanently suspend accounts tweeting about these issues that we know are involved in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are trying to evade a previous suspension, something we have seen more of in the past weeks, “Twitter said.
There is no evidence that anything QAnon claims is real.
Followers make unsubstantiated claims and then amplify them with manipulated or out-of-context evidence posted on social media to back up the allegations.
The birth of the lawless group, and its continued infiltration into mainstream American life, comes in light of the Russian disinformation campaign that targeted the 2016 U.S. election.
While the Russian campaign had an apparent goal: influencing voters to elect Trump, QAnon is decentralized and has no clear goal other than its popular catchphrase, “Question Everything.”
Anyone can create a conspiracy, offer evidence to back it up, and tag it with QAnon hashtags to spread. But no one is responsible for the trail of chaos and misinformation he leaves behind.
Twitter said it won’t serve any more QAnon-associated content in its Trends and Recommendations section, it will also prevent it from being highlighted in searches and block URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on Twitter.
“These actions will be comprehensively implemented this week,” the company said. “We will continue to review this activity on our service and update our compliance approach and rules again as necessary.”
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