Twitter will suspend accounts tweeting about conspiracy theory group QAnon

[July 22, 2020]  (Reuters) - Twitter Inc <TWTR.N> said on Tuesday it would permanently suspend accounts that violate its policies while tweeting about QAnon, a fringe group that claims "deep-state" traitors are plotting against President Donald Trump.

Twitter, which announced the change on its Twitter Safety page, said it would not serve content and accounts associated with QAnon in trends and recommendations, and would block URLs associated with the group from being shared on the platform. The suspension, which will be rolled out this week, is expected to impact about 150,000 accounts globally, Twitter said. It said that more than 7,000 accounts have been removed in the last several weeks for violating the company's rules against spam, platform manipulation and ban evasion.

The suspensions will be applied to accounts "engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension — something we’ve seen more of in recent weeks," Twitter said.

In online conspiracies, the term "deep-state" is used to refer to a combination of elites from the intelligence, political, business and entertainment fields, with QAnon's theories claiming that the "deep-state" is at a secret war with Trump.

The Twitter logo and binary cyber codes are seen in this illustration taken November 26, 2019. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

QAnon has also claimed that Democratic Party members are behind international crime rings. The group's content has spread widely on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. Earlier this year, Facebook removed a U.S. network of fake accounts linked to QAnon.

Last year, the FBI issued a warning about "conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists" and designated QAnon as a potential domestic extremist threat.

(Reporting by Rama Venkat, Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru and Katie Paul in San Francisco; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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