Twitter announced on Monday night it has removed more than 70,000 accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, citing concerns that the adherents could spread material "with the potential to lead to offline harm."
In a blog post, Twitter explained that the 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." In July, Twitter banned 7,000 QAnon accounts.
President Trump had his Twitter account permanently suspended on Friday because he violated rules against inciting violence. Over the last several weeks, he pushed baseless claims of voter fraud, urged Vice President Mike Pence to overthrow the election results, and encouraged supporters to attend a "big protest in D.C. on Jan. 6th," adding, "Be there, will be wild!" This event ended with a pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol as lawmakers certified the election results.
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The removal of tens of thousands of QAnon Twitter accounts coincided with several conservative personalities, including former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), complaining that their number of followers had suddenly dropped. Sanders took this very personally, tweeting that "the radical left" and "their big tech allies" were attempting to "marginalize, censor, or silence the American people."
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