Days after permanently suspending the account of US President Donald Trump, Twitter is now cleaning up extremism from the microblogging site. Twitter said that it has taken some steps to stop conversations on its platform that can incite violence. Over 70,000 accounts that were primarily sharing QAnon content have been removed. The company said that there were fears that those accounts can spread such material which can lead to offline harm. In a blog post, the microblogging site said that these accounts were propagating conspiracy theories across the service.
“These accounts were deliberately sharing misleading information about the election outcome. We have a very clear policy under which strictest action is taken against behavior that can lead to offline harm,” Twitter said. The company said that it started purging accounts that were sharing QAnon related content following the US Capitol riots. “There were many people who were holding multiple accounts. This has resulted in an increase in the number of impacted accounts. These accounts were mainly involved in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content.” The number of impacted accounts this time is 10 times more than that of July purging of QAnon supporters. The crackdown has resulted in the loss of followers of many far-right leaders. Several of them have been complaining about it through Twitter posts.
Meanwhile, e-commerce giant Amazon too has toughened its stand and removing all products related to QAnon from its platform. A spokesperson of the company said that the entire process will take a couple of days. The company has warned that sellers who will be found evading the system will have to face action, which can even be a complete bank across all Amazon stores. The move comes after QAnon supporters were prominently seen during the Capitol riots last week. The ban will apply to everything promoting QAnon, be it posters, clothing, stickers, etc. Amazon took the decision to ban Q-related products after it removed social network Parler from its server.
Jeffrey is acting editor in chief of AmazingNews24 with over seven years of experience in the field of online news under his belt. Jeffrey has worked with multiple media houses and is currently leading a team of journalists, sub-editors and writers through his entrepreneurial endeavours.
