Twitter conducts mass deletion of 70,000 allegedly QAnon-associated accounts

Twitter said on Monday that it had removed a further 70,000 accounts associated with the QAnon movement, as the company continues to crack down on accounts they say violate their standards.

According to The New York Times, Twitter and others have been identifying posts and accounts that may have "the potential to lead to offline harm," but critics are saying that this amounts to censorship before the fact.

Twitter and other social media have lately been on a rampage, deleting the accounts of anybody who they think might have the slightest possibility of inciting violence online.

"These accounts were engaged in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service," Twitter wrote in a blog post.

Facebook also said that it would flag the phrase "Stop the Steal," which referred to the contention that the presidential election held on Nov. 3 was rife with fraud and voter irregularities.

Both Twitter and Facebook have iterated that they will permanently ban any account found to have violated their civic integrity policy, which disallows any content that discourages voters from voting, or gives what they construe as misinformation about an election.

QAnon doesn't have consistent beliefs or values across the spectrum of people online using that moniker, but many of them are fanatical supporters of President Trump, saying that he is here to save the world from what they call the "cabal".

Facebook has been on the warpath against QAnon since August of 2020, doing their best to shut down any account or page associated with the movement.