Twitter Expands QAnon Ban To Political Candidates, Elected Officials
Political candidates and elected officials who share QAnon content on Twitter will have their visibility on the platform restricted, thanks to a new batch of rules against “coordinated harmful activity” Twitter implemented on Thursday.
The action is an expansion of a QAnon crackdown the social platform began in July, when it banned more than 7,000 accounts and limited the activity of tens of thousands more in response to the far-right conspiracy movement and its groundless, dangerous theories.
Twitter claims impressions of Qanon-related content and accounts have dropped more than 50% since then.
While Instagram and its parent company Facebook have also cracked down on QAnon, the platforms still give politicians a free pass to lie and distribute misinformation, hypothetically including QAnon content. Facebook told HuffPost it plans to prohibit politicians and candidates from running ads praising, supporting or representing QAnon, but that policy has yet to be introduced.
A Twitter spokesperson told HuffPost the new framework “has no exceptions” and will apply to all candidates and elected officials, including President Donald Trump. Asked last month about QAnon and its litany of baseless claims, Trump insisted he didn’t know much about the movement, but said he “appreciates” support from its adherents.
The Twitter spokesperson said, “We apply the same approach to candidates/elected officials as we do to every other account: Accounts which engage in promoting QAnon on Twitter will no longer be actively recommended by Twitter. Furthermore, if these verified accounts were to engage in swarming activity, those tweets will be downranked.”
QAnon followers take their cues from what they believe is an anonymous high-ranking government official ― or perhaps a team of officials ― who they dubbed “Q” and who, since the fall of 2017, supposedly has been sprinkling obscure, often inscrutable clues online. QAnon followers then interpret...
