Twitter bans personal account of U.S. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
CBC
Twitter on Sunday banned the personal account of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for multiple violations of its COVID-19 misinformation policy, according to a statement from the company.
The Georgia Republican's account was permanently suspended under the "strike" system launched by Twitter in March. It uses artificial intelligence to identify posts about the coronavirus that are misleading enough to cause harm to people. Two or three strikes earn a 12-hour account lock, four strikes prompt a weeklong suspension and five or more strikes can get someone permanently removed from Twitter.
In a statement on the messaging app Telegram, Greene blasted Twitter's move as un-American. She wrote that her account was suspended after tweeting statistics from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a government database that includes unverified raw data.
"Twitter is an enemy to America and can't handle the truth," the Republican said. "That's fine, I'll show America we don't need them and it's time to defeat our enemies."
Twitter had previously suspended Greene's personal account for periods ranging from 12 hours to a full week. The ban applies to Greene's personal account, @mtgreenee, but does not affect her official Twitter account, @RepMTG.
In July, Twitter suspended Greene for a week after U.S. President Joe Biden urged tech companies to take stronger action against bogus vaccine claims that are "killing people." Twitter has defended its efforts to keep dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 off its site, saying it has removed thousands of tweets and challenged millions of accounts worldwide.
Among the final tweets from her personal account was one Saturday that falsely referenced "extremely high amounts of covid vaccine deaths," according to her Telegram account, which appears to mirror her now-banned Twitter feed when compared with Greene tweets stored in the Internet Archive.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House's top medical adviser, said Sunday that the U.S. has been seeing almost a "vertical increase" of new COVID-19 cases, now averaging 400,000 cases a day, with hospitalizations also up. The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has driven a surge in new cases across the U.S.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is ordering a blockade of all "sanctioned oil tankers" into Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country's authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro in a move that seemed designed to put a tighter chokehold on the South American country's economy.
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