Twitter removes 70,000 QAnon accounts in purge against extremism
Pollemix News – January 11, 2021
Twitter’s crackdown on extremist content continued unabated today as they removed 70,000 accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory. It is the latest salvo by the social media giant following the Capitol Hill riots last Wednesday and comes only days after they permanently banned President Donald Trump from the platform for “incitement of violence.”
Explaining their reasoning for the removal Twitter explained in their blog post:
“Given the violent events in Washington, DC, and increased risk of harm, we began permanently suspending thousands of accounts that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content on Friday afternoon.”
Adding, “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.”
QAnon is a widely discredited, right wing conspiracy theory which contends that the US is controlled by a cabal of Satanist pedophiles from the halls of academia, Hollywood and the Democrat Party who are secretly plotting against President Trump. Trump is the messiah of the QAnon movement and many of those who stormed the Capitol last week were dedicated followers of the crackpot theory, including Ashli Babbitt who was shot and killed in the riot.
Although QAnon’s predictions have repeatedly failed to come to fruition, the movement has gathered steam amongst the radical right wing who have embraced the theory as a central tenet to Trump’s Presidency. In 2017 “Q” predicted that Hillary Clinton, John Podesta and Huma Abedin would be arrested on November 6 of that year, but unsurprisngly that ultimately failed to materialize, as have the repeated claims that Trump was on the verge of launching a spate of arrests of 25,000 government officials to ‘drain the swamp’ of the enemies within. Despite these events never transpiring the enthusiasm amongst the right wing has never really diminished and the Capitol Building riot had nearly as many QAnon shirts as MAGA hats.
Facebook has also banned QAnon off it’s platform and the right wing site Parler has ‘gone dark’ after Amazon pulled it from it’s server network, so the likelihood is that the remaining devotees will have to return to the darker corners of the internet from where the QAnon theory was first spawned.
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