Twitter announces broad crackdown on conspiracy theory group QAnon

Twitter Inc said on Tuesday it would permanently suspend accounts that violate its policies while tweeting aboutQAnon, a fringe group that claims "deep-state" traitors are plotting against President Donald Trump.

Twitter, which announced the change on its Twitter Safety page, said it would not serve content and accounts associated withQAnonin trends and recommendations, and would block URLs associated with the group from being shared on the platform.

The suspension, which will be rolled out this week, is expected to impact about 150,000 accounts globally, Twitter said. More than 7,000 accounts have been removed in the last several weeks for violating the company's rules against spam, platform manipulation and ban evasion.

The suspensions will be applied to accounts "engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension,something we’ve seen more of in recent weeks," Twitter said.

In online conspiracies, the term "deep-state" is used to refer to a combination of elites from the intelligence, political, business and entertainment fields, withQAnon's theories claiming that the "deep-state" is at a secret war with Trump.

QAnonhas also claimed that Democratic Party members are behind international crime rings. The group's content has spread widely on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. Earlier this year, Facebook removed a USnetwork of fake accounts linked toQAnon.

Last year, the FBI issued a warning about "conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists" and designatedQAnonas a potential domestic extremist threat.

Earlier,Anti-Defamation League (ADL)chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt had pointed outthe social media giant's "haphazard" placement of advertising, pointing to an example in which a Verizon ad appeared next to "a video from the conspiracy groupQAnondrawing on hateful and anti-Semitic rhetoric."

Facebook is under increasing pressure for its hands-off approach to misinformation and inflammatory posts, particularly by US President Donald Trump.

The social media company made an estimated $70 billion annually from ads, the coalition -- which includes the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) -- behind #StopHateForProfit claimed in a statement on the ADL website.