“Misleading and false information surrounding the 2020 US presidential election has been the basis for incitement to violence around the country,” Twitter said.
By Josh Plank, World Israel News
Twitter announced on Monday that it has suspended more than 70,000 accounts since Friday following last week’s protest over the certification of election results in Washington, D.C.
Twitter’s actions, which came in the wake of the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol building by Trump supporters, have shifted the conversation from the riots themselves to issues of censorship and free speech for at least part of America’s electorate.
Wall Street may have been expressing its disapproval with Twitter’s actions as the company’s stock fell as much as 6.4% on Monday.
In a post on the company’s official blog, Twitter said the actions were taken “to protect the conversation on our service from attempts to incite violence, organize attacks, and share deliberately misleading information about the election outcome.”
“Now that the results of the election have been officially certified by Congress, we updated our Civic Integrity policy on Friday to aggressively increase our enforcement action on these claims,” the statement said.
Twitter’s Civic Integrity policy now prohibits “misleading information” about election outcomes “intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process.”
Such information includes but is not limited to “disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself” and “misleading claims” about election results that “could lead to interference with the implementation of the results.”
“Ultimately, repeated violations of this policy can result in permanent suspension,” Twitter said.
Twitter said it’s no longer allowing any tweets labeled for violations of its Civic Integrity policy to be replied to, liked, or retweeted.
The company also said it is blocking certain keywords from trending and appearing in search results.
Twitter said that accounts that have tweeted or retweeted unapproved content will be subject to “limited visibility across search, replies, and on timelines,” a process commonly known as “shadow banning.”
Twitter announced the permanent suspension of President Donald Trump on Friday, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Similarly, on Monday Facebook announced that it’s removing all content containing the phrase “stop the steal” from Facebook and Instagram. Facebook banned President Trump from its platform indefinitely on Thursday.
Social media’s turn against Trump has caused his supporters to seek alternative social media platforms like Parler and Gab. Prominent conservative pundits have announced they are leaving Twitter in protest. Rush Limbaugh’s Twitter account has already been deactivated.
Apple and Google have both removed the Parler app from their app stores, while Amazon booted Parler from its web-hosting service on Sunday night, citing inadequate content-moderation as its reason.
“There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch,” said Parler CEO John Matze.