Twitter Bans 7k Accounts In Attempt to Purge QAnon Content Occurred on 21 Jul 2020

Twitter placed any activity related to the QAnon “conspiracy theory” under a new classification of “coordinated harmful activity.” In an attempt to purge all related content, Twitter accounced the following policy changes:

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.

In addition, we will:

1. No longer serve content and accounts associated with QAnon in Trends and recommendations
2. Work to ensure we’re not highlighting this activity in search and conversations
3. Block URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on Twitter

– Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) 21 Jul 2020

A Twitter spokesperson also told several news outlets that the platform had already removed about 7k accounts over the past week and that these policy changes were expected to impact nearly 150k more accounts worldwide over the following week.

Twitter is not the only platform to have taken action against QAnon. In early May, Facebook announced they had removed 5 pages, 20 accounts, and 6 groups “associated with the QAnon network.” In late May, Google removed 3 QAnon apps from the Play Store.