Tag: social media

Twitter Suspends 70,000 Accounts Claming QAnon Ties

Twitter has reportedly banned more than 70,000 accounts it claims are linked to the QAnon movement following the events on Capitol Hill last week.

The Hill reports that Twitter has announced that it has banned over 70,000 accounts sharing content relating to the QAnon conspiracy theory on its platform following the protests at Capitol Hill last week. Twitter confirmed in a recent blog post that it has removed the accounts in an effort to “protect the conversation on our service from attempts to incite violence.”

The blog post states: “We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm. Given the violent events in Washington, DC, and increased risk of harm, we began permanently suspending thousands of accounts that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content on Friday afternoon.”

Twitter stated that “many” of the individuals affected by the ban “held multiple accounts” sharing content relating to the QAnon conspiracy theory. The banned accounts were allegedly “engaged in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory.”

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How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler

But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.

If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.

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Facebook Blocking Ron Paul Shows Tech Censorship is Not About Trump, It’s About Suppressing Dissent

Dr. Ron Paul who has been a champion of peace and liberty for decades was unceremoniously blocked from his own page on Facebook Monday. Facebook claimed Ron Paul, who has long promoted everyone getting along, civil liberties, police accountability, and ending US wars, was repeatedly going “against our community standards.”

“With no explanation other than “repeatedly going against our community standards,” Facebook has blocked me from managing my page. Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified,” Ron Paul tweeted out Monday afternoon.

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Twitter Hasn’t Suspended These Accounts Or Tweets That Openly Incite Violence

On Friday, Twitter joined a slew of other social media companies in permanently suspending Donald Trump’s accounts. Subsequently, many other conservative users found themselves deplatformed by the tech giant. The tech oligarchs’ argument is that Trump’s social media presence incites violence, as evidenced by the riot in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

Twitter argued that several of Trump’s tweets violated its Glorification of Violence policy, which states, “You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people. We also prohibit the glorification of violence.”

Unsurprisingly, there are countless Twitter accounts that regularly call for harm or violence, in violation of this policy, yet have been allowed to persist. While the president’s posts and remarks have included some awful things, they have been in no way worse than much of what transpires on the platform.

Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has an intact Twitter account that consistently glorifies acts of violence, yet the brutal dictator has not faced any censorship or suspension. After the heartbreaking beheading of a French teacher because he showed a political cartoon depicting Mohammad, and a mass stabbing in a church in Nice, Khamenei focused vitriol on those murdered, claiming the “rage” of Muslim extremists had demonstrated its “vitality.”

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Non-MAGA Activists Caught in Social Media War as Twitter Begins Purge

While many who opposed the president celebrated, whistleblower and internet freedom advocate Edward Snowden warned that allowing social media companies to set a precedent where they could effectively ban whoever they want from their services set a chilling precedent. “I know a lot of folks in the comments [who] read this are like ‘YAAAAS,’ which, like — I get it. But imagine for a moment a world that exists for more than the next 13 days, and this becomes a milestone that will endure,” he wrote on Twitter.

Almost immediately, a number of non-Trump accounts began to face problems, with pro-Assange journalist Suzie Dawson locked out of her account, educational file sharing website Sci Hub’s account suspended, and the Red Scare podcast’s profile deleted. Other figures began to demand that the accounts associated with the Venezuelan and Chinese government be removed from social media platforms as well. 

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