QAnon is running out of major online platforms where it can spread its conspiracies.
In a statement to NPR, the viral video app TikTok has confirmed that it bans accounts spreading QAnon disinformation.
QAnon is a far right conspiracy theory based on the unfounded belief that President Donald Trump is secretly battling a satanic global child-trafficking ring run by the Democrats and liberal Hollywood elites.
“Content and accounts that promote QAnon violate our disinformation policy and we remove them from our platform,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to Mashable. “We’ve also taken significant steps to make this content harder to find across search and hashtags by redirecting associated terms to our Community Guidelines.”
TikTok had already updated its policies over the past few months in order to limit the spread of disinformation on the platform. The company began to impose stricter policies on what was allowed, specifically when it came to election and coronavirus-related misinformation. Those rule changes came about as the company struggled with its own battle in the United States, as the Trump administration sought to ban the app over its connections to its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
As TikTok mentioned in its statement, the account ban policy isn’t the first action the company has taken against QAnon. The company previously cracked down on the conspiracy theory by blocking hashtag trends and searches mentioning QAnon or related conspiracies, such as Pizzagate.
By blocking these hashtags, TikTok severely limited the ability to find QAnon content. However, there were workarounds, such as alternative spellings or new hashtags associated with the conspiracy.
“We continually update our safeguards with misspellings and new phrases as we work to keep TikTok a safe and authentic place for our community,” TikTok’s spokesperson told me.
Earlier this month, Facebook prohibited Pages and Groups that promote QAnon. YouTube also followed suit in banning certain types of “harmful” QAnon and other conspiratorial content.