Twitter announced Tuesday that it had banned more than 7,000 accounts dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory in recent weeks and limited the visibility of 150,000 more, NBC News reports. The company said it would henceforth classify posts related to the conspiracy theory, which holds that President Donald Trump is crusading against a clandestine ring of high-society pedophiles, as coordinated harmful activity and take stronger action against them, including hiding terms related to it on the social network’s trending and search pages. As more violent attacks linked to QAnon occur and even congressional candidates begin to tout it, Twitter said QAnon’s connection to offline danger was undeniable, which critics said was a welcome, if delayed, move. The company’s official account tweeted, “We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm. In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called ‘QAnon’ activity across the service.”
We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are 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.
