Twitter announced on Tuesday that they will take sweeping actions to prevent QAnon “conspiracy theories” about elite pedophile sex rings from being circulated on their social media platform.
A spokesperson from the organisation said in the past few weeks Twitter has suspended more than 7,000 QAnon accounts and placed restrictions on approximately 150,000 others.
The social media giant will also ban QAnon-related terms from appearing in trending topics and the platforms search feature, ban known QAnon-related URLs, and ban “swarming” of victims who are baselessly targeted by coordinated harassment campaigns pushed by its followers.
QAnon theories involve the belief that President Trump is waging a secret war on the “deep state” and child sex trafficking rings run by elites who engage in pedophilia, blood-drinking, and cannibalism. Information is said to be fed to QAnons through an anonymous high-ranking government official known only as “Q”.
Twitter’s crackdown comes after QAnons accused Chrissy Teigen of having links to billionaire pedophile Jeffery Epstein over a number of questionable past tweets. Teigen was then forced to make her profile private and delete 60,000 of her own posts.
Perhaps what’s most ironic about the move to ban QAnon theories is that Twitter’s standing policy allows for users to discuss adult attraction to minors as well as share some depictions of nude children.
According to the website terms of service: “Discussions related to child sexual exploitation as a phenomenon or attraction towards minors are permitted, provided they don’t promote or glorify child sexual exploitation in any way.”
Twitter goes on to allow for nude depictions of minors in certain instances, stating: “Artistic depictions of nude minors in a non-sexualized context or setting may be permitted in a limited number of scenarios e.g., works by internationally renowned artists that feature minors.”
But has Twitter’s actions only thrown more fuel on the flames by singling out one supposedly “harmful” group, while, as Dave Rubin noted, giving known terrorist organisations a free pass?
Antifa and Hamas totally cool though. https://t.co/G18O8YoJuj
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) July 22, 2020
As one user said in response to the crackdown: “It is interesting that there are countless conspiracy theories on Twitter, and yet the one they chose to ban is the one about elite pedophile sex rings.”
Regardless of what you think of QAnon, it’s hard to see how these targeted sweeping bans won’t cause many within those circles to assume that they may have hit a little too close to the truth.
