Twitter moved to temporarily suspend Marjorie Taylor-Greene on Sunday, locking the recently elected Georgia Congresswoman out of her account for 12 hours.
“The account referenced has been temporarily locked out for multiple violations of our civic integrity policy,” a Twitter spokesperson said. The suspension followed Taylor-Greene tweets from earlier Sunday that leaned into widely debunked conspiracies about the 2020 election and subsequent Senate run-off in Georgia.
The congresswoman is well known as a fiery presence on Twitter. She also picked up some notoriety in 2020 ahead of the election for expressing anti-Muslim views and voicing support for the (completely ridiculous but nonetheless harmful) QAnon conspiracy theory.
Twitter’s civic integrity policy was introduced ahead of the 2020 election and then updated in the wake of the domestic terror incident at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Even though Joseph R. Biden indisputably won that election, President Donald Trump and his adherents leveled baseless allegations about a “stolen election” in the months that followed.
“You may not use Twitter’s services for the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes,” the civic integrity policy text reads. “This includes posting or sharing content that may suppress participation or mislead people about when, where, or how to participate in a civic process. In addition, we may label and reduce the visibility of Tweets containing false or misleading information about civic processes in order to provide additional context.”
Based on Twitter’s own system of consequences for policy violations, this would be Taylor-Greene’s second or third such breach. Twitter takes no “account-level action” for a first strike, then escalates the punishment to a 12-hour suspension on the second and third strikes. A fourth strike would result in a 7-day account lock and “5 or more strikes” leads to a permanent suspension.
Twitter has historically been hesitant to take action against offending tweets from elected officials, claiming there’s a “public interest” defense for keeping such content up. But Trump’s own increasingly rules-flouting behavior ultimately prompted Twitter to start flagging problematic posts with disclaimers. That escalated to his full suspension from the platform after Jan. 6.
Given the possibility of Twitter’s legal exposure in the wake of the Capitol attack, it’s likely that the platform will continue to take a more aggressive stance toward accounts that fail to comply with user conduct policies. Taylor-Greene would do well to remember that if she hopes to hang on to her Twitter following.
The congresswoman issued a statement late Sunday decrying the suspension, which she claims was handed down “without explanation.” The statement also leans into a popular view on the far right that content moderation policies aimed at protecting users are an example of “cancel” culture, pointing to the recent suspension of Trump and the corresponding “purging [of] an unknown number of conservatives.” The latter point may be a reference to Twitter’s recent removal of more than 70,000 accounts that have ties to QAnon.
Taylor-Greene’s full statement is easy enough to find if you go looking for it, but we’re not going to reprint or link out to it here given the stream of lies and half-truths it leans on.