CBS News found out Twitter purged over 150,000 associated with QAnon since the January 6th Capitol Hill riots. Previous reports indicated the social media platform only eliminated 70,000 accounts.
From CBS News:
In interviews with CBS News, senior Twitter officials described a yearslong effort to fight domestic conspiracy theories. They said they adapted similar strategies previously used to combat international terrorism and child sexual exploitation. They recounted how for months before January 6 they limited the visibility of QAnon-associated accounts — hoping to encourage users to modify their behavior — and ultimately took more decisive action after the riot that left five dead and dozens injured.”That was a moment of reckoning where we realized that the approach that we had put in place the previous fall, of attempting to reduce the influence of this movement, wasn’t sufficient,” one Twitter official said.
Twitter removed tweets after the “Pizzagate” ended with a man shooting up “a pizza restaurant he wrongly believed was associated with child sex trafficking.”
A person at Twitter said removing tweets backfired: “What we saw was when we removed tweets, people were like, ‘Oh, Twitter is removing these. So we must really be onto something. We’ve hit a button, we’ve hit a nerve. We are right about this and Twitter’s in on it too.’ And it really just kind of snowballed.”
But how can Twitter tell which account is associated with QAnon? A few ways:
Twitter’s began a major effort in July 2020, four months before the election. Twitter announced that QAnon and accounts that promoted it were in violation of the site’s coordinated harmful activity policies.Twitter used “a combination of human review and then very high confidence machine learning to help us identify not just who is sort of QAnon adjacent, but really what the core community of accounts is,” according to a senior Twitter official. The company had for years used similar processes “to address everything from child sexual exploitation, to networks of terrorists, to spam.”
Twitter will not touch ANTIFA accounts because it agrees with FBI Director Christopher Wray that it is “an ideology not an organization.”
So Twitter is cool with your violence, hatred, and conspiracy theories if it belongs to an ideology and not an organization.
Twitter will allow you to use the platform if you are rehabilitated. The language, you guys:
Speaking with CBS News, senior Twitter officials described the effort as part of their focus on “deradicalization” and “rehabilitation” of the people spreading QAnon.”We really want to create opportunities to come back from the fringes of this conspiracy and be sort of turned into healthy participants in the conversation on Twitter,” a Twitter official said.
Um, it’s never a good look to use “rehabilitation” with anything not connected to an addition. Might as well say re-education.
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