Twitter purges 7,000 accounts linked to pro-Trump group QAnon

San Francisco, July 22 (IANS) Twitter on Tuesday said it is removing more than 7,000 accounts associated with the far-right conspiracy theory group QAnon, citing concerns about offline harm.

QAnon emerged in the US President Donald Trump era and its supporters believe that Trump is waging a hidden battle against a secretive elite known as the “Deep State”.

Twitter said the enforcement will go into effect this week and will affect 150,000 accounts in total for breaking the policies around offline harm.

“We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behaviour 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,” Twitter Support tweeted.

The company said it 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”.

Twitter will no longer serve content and accounts associated with QAnon in trends and recommendations or highlight their activity in search and conversations and block associated URLs.

“These actions will be rolled out comprehensively this week. We will continue to review this activity across our service and update our rules and enforcement approach again if necessary,” said Twitter.

QAnon is known for its connection to Pizzagate, a baseless conspiracy that accused former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton of running a sex trafficking ring out of a Washington DC pizza place.

“The conspiracy inspired an armed believer to show up to the pizza shop, where he fired a rifle inside the restaurant, though no one was injured,” reports TechCrunch.

–IANS

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