Twitter suspends 70,000 QAnon accounts after US Capitol attack to protect conversations

Twitter on January 11 suspended nearly 70,000 Twitter accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theories related to US President Donald Trump. The tech giant took the drastic measure after violence ensued at the government’s Capitol building in Washington last week in a dastardly breach of law. In an official blogpost, Twitter said that it traced several accounts sharing manipulative conspiracy theory QAnon-associated content on a large scale, inciting a right-wing conspiracy movement. Several such accounts falsely claimed that President Donald Trump was up against a global pedophile ring that was operated by the Democratic Party members. 

"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,” Twitter said in a blog post on January 11.

"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", the microblogging site added.

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Twitter launched a crackdown against QAnon theorists that alleged Trump was ‘secretly’ fighting child-sex predators in Hollywood and "deep state" allies in umpteen cryptic messages that incited the pro-Trump supporters to ‘overthrow’ the perpetrators and take back control. QAnon supporters dubbed as ‘Q’ congregated members in a mass movement to overthrow ‘evil democratic cabal’. 

Breach of site’s civic integrity policy

In the aftermath of the failed attempt at Coup’ at the Capitol building, Trump had called the rioters “people who love our country”, which prompting the microblogging site to permanently dismiss his account to prevent his supporters' uprising. Twitter cautioned in the blogpost that effective immediately, the conspiracy theorists will not be able to “retweet, like or reply to any posts that breach site’s civic integrity policy”. The site accused the far-right conspiracy mob of ‘aggressively deploying’ its services and technology for spreading harmful content, violence, and breach of law and order that violated its standards.

However, in one of his last tweets before the suspension, Trump wrote on Twitter: ‘I have always said we would continue our fight to ensure that only legal votes were counted. While this represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it's only the beginning of our fight to Make America Great Again!’

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