Twitter Bans High-Profile Trump Supporters Promoting QAnon

US media is report­ing that Twit­ter has removed the accounts of high-pro­file sup­port­ers of Pres­i­dent Trump who pro­mot­ed the so-called QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry. Accord­ing to an NBC News report:

Jan­u­ary 8, 2021, Twit­ter on Fri­day removed the accounts of Michael Fly­nn, Sid­ney Pow­ell and oth­er high-pro­file sup­port­ers of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump who pro­mot­ed the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry. The per­ma­nent bans are among the high­est pro­file that the com­pa­ny has insti­tut­ed as part of its efforts to crack down on mis­in­for­ma­tion and calls for vio­lence. Fly­nn and Pow­ell both met with Trump at the White House in recent weeks as part of efforts to over­turn the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results. They are also high-pro­file fig­ures in the QAnon com­mu­ni­ty, and Fly­nn even took an “oath” to the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry last year. “The accounts have been sus­pend­ed in line with our pol­i­cy on Coor­di­nat­ed Harm­ful Activ­i­ty,” a Twit­ter spokesper­son told NBC News. “We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforce­ment action on behav­ior that has the poten­tial to lead to offline harm, and giv­en the renewed poten­tial for vio­lence sur­round­ing this type of behav­ior in the com­ing days, we will per­ma­nent­ly sus­pend accounts that are sole­ly ded­i­cat­ed to shar­ing QAnon content.”

Read the rest here.

In July of last year, for exam­ple, CNN report­ed that Gen­er­al Fly­nn had post­ed a video to Twit­ter in which he is is “seen using phras­es and slo­gans that are hall­marks of the base­less QAnon con­spir­a­cy move­ment.” CNN also not­ed that he tagged his post with a QAnon hashtag

The BBC has described QAnon as follows:

At its heart, QAnon is a wide-rang­ing, unfound­ed con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that says that Pres­i­dent Trump is wag­ing a secret war against elite Satan-wor­ship­ping pae­dophiles in gov­ern­ment, busi­ness and the media. QAnon believ­ers have spec­u­lat­ed that this fight will lead to a day of reck­on­ing where promi­nent peo­ple such as for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Hillary Clin­ton will be arrest­ed and executed.media cap­tion­Trump on QAnon: ‘They do like me’ That’s the basic sto­ry, but there are so many off­shoots, detours and inter­nal debates that the total list of QAnon claims is enor­mous — and often con­tra­dic­to­ry. Adher­ents draw in news events, his­tor­i­cal facts and numerol­o­gy to devel­op their own far-fetched conclusions.

Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ing on QAnon has included:

• We report­ed yes­ter­day that  Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, a new­ly elect­ed mem­ber of the US House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, is a sup­port­er of the QAnon con­spir­a­cy theory.

• We report­ed last week on the influ­ence of QAnon on the Repub­li­can Par­ty in the US.

• We report­ed in Octo­ber that Russia’s Inter­net Research Agency troll farm was attempt­ing to use social media accounts to boost the role of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries pro­mot­ed by QAnon.

• We also report­ed in Octo­ber that YouTube had joined Face­book and oth­er social media com­pa­nies in tak­ing action against QAnon.