After the attempted overthrow of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., the microblogging service Twitter is now drawing its consequences. Twitter has now tightened its conditions and deleted more than 70,000 accounts of QAnon followers.
Twitter’s cleanup operation has been underway since Friday
After last Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol in the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C., Twitter responded. The microblogging service began shutting down accounts used to spread QAnon propaganda on Friday. QAnon is a conspiracy theory sprung from Internet forums, which is based on cryptic messages from a political insider. The theory’s supporters believe that Donald Trump is waging a secret battle against the country’s left-wing liberal politicians. Led by Hillary Clinton and former U.S. President Barack Obama, they are said to be operating out of a restaurant in Washington. In total, there are probably over 70,000 accounts affected by the deletion. This has caused relevant Twitter users to lose followers, but the intervention was urgently needed. Some Republicans seem to have lost several thousand followers. Apart from deleting the accounts, the service has also adjusted its rules. In particular, the ban on “coordinated harmful activities” has been adjusted. The German translation of the update is still pending, but should come quite quickly.
Facebook also creates order
The social network Facebook is also bringing some order into it. Here, all posts that use the term “Stop the Steal” are now deleted directly. Since under this slogan a fantasy of the large election fraud in the USA is represented as fact.
Blocking Donald Trump does not remain without consequences
After the still acting U.S. President Donald Trump was blocked by Twitter last week, 30 police officers guarded the entrance of the headquarters of Twitter in San Francisco on Monday. Reason were here calls in a fan forum of the president that one should demonstrate against the exclusion. The microblogging service’s building is currently empty due to the current Corona pandemic. All employees are working from home at the moment. According to reports, only three demonstrators appeared in total due to the calls, two of them for the blocking and one against the blocking of President Trump.
