New Delhi: In keeping with its message about taking “strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm”, Twitter Wednesday announced a slew of measures to crack down on the QAnon movement.

QAnon, which started as a conspiracy theory that alleged there was a secret plot against US President Donald Trump, has since grown into a pro-Trump movement. Led by followers of the US President, it includes a range of celebrities, media personalities and influential social media accounts.

We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm. In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called ‘QAnon’ activity across the service.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) July 22, 2020

Detailing the steps in a thread, the social media giant said, “We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are 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.”

While Twitter did not mention how many accounts will be affected owing to this step, a BBC report notes the number could be as high as 1,50,000. In the past week, more than 7,000 accounts have been removed for violations.

Along with the mass suspension of accounts, Twitter also announced that it will no longer serve content and accounts associated with QAnon in Trends and recommendations, will work to ensure it’s not highlighting this activity in search and conversations and block URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on Twitter.

These steps will be comprehensively rolled out in the coming week, and the microblogging platform notes that it will “continue to review this activity across our service and update our rules and enforcement approach again if necessary”.

“As we work at scale to protect the public conversation in the face of evolving threats, we’ll continue to lead with transparency and offer more context on our efforts,” Twitter added.

Origin of QAnon

What was once a conspiracy theory that supported Republican President Trump, QAnon has shifted from the fringe to the mainstream on social media since it began in October 2017. The movement grew after a series of messages on the “very loosely moderated message board” 4chan were posted by a user called ‘Q’, who was allegedly someone with top security clearance within the US government.

Its main conspiracy theory, according to CNN, is that dozens of politicians and A-list celebrities work with governments to engage in child sex abuse.

Though all users on the platform are inherently anonymous, it has not stopped the QAnon movement from growing, picking up on disconnected breadcrumbs of information to form elaborate theories.

There has been little by way of evidence to show that any of QAnon’s claims are factual.

This is only the latest battle front for Twitter, which faced a near-disaster just last week after multiple high-profile accounts were hacked at a time when it is aggressively fighting the spread of misinformation.

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