Twitter muzzles 150,000 'QAnon' accounts in sweeping conspiracy theory crackdown

Twitter has launched a broad crackdown against the United States' growing QAnon conspiracy movement, branding it an incubator of "coordinated abuse" and harassment.

The social network said on Wednesday that it had banned about 7,000 accounts associated with QAnon for spam and deceptive activity, along with around 150,000 caught up in sweeping sanctions designed to limit online mobbing campaigns.

Those users and their tweets will disappear from Twitter's algorithmic recommendations and trending topics bulletins. Tweets that boost and respond to harassment campaigns may also become invisible in results.

The announcement represents a new phase in Twitter's struggle to promote "healthy conversation", in which the company will designate entire networks of users as toxic and requiring suppression.

It is also Twitter's first serious jab against QAnon, a chaotic online cult that has entangled many supporters of President Donald Trump and has been linked to murders and kidnappings.

Adherents work to decipher the writings of a cryptic figure known as "Q", which they believe will guide them through an apocalyptic battle between Mr Trump and an all-encompassing paedophile conspiracy.

Twitter said: "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."

A spokeswoman added that the same suppression policy will be applied to other harassment networks in future, describing it as an overdue response to the problem of "coordinated harmful activity".

She said that QAnon had been repeatedly implicated in such attacks, which are often organised on other websites which direct their members to swamp specific targets with abusive tweets calculated to drive them offline.

The company, she said, had ultimately concluded that it would be complicit in such abuse unless it took action to quiet the perpetrators and to prevent them from exploiting Twitter's algorithms and recommendation systems.

For example, the decision to exclude some tweets from search results was taken because participants in harassment campaigns often search for existing abuse that they can add to. Some web addresses "associated with QAnon" will also be banned.

The measures are not intended to remove users' speech from the service or prevent users within the network from talking with each other. Tweets hidden from search results will still be visible to users who follow their authors, for example.

The spokeswoman said that any decision to isolate accounts would be reviewed by a human moderator.