Twitter suspended Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic account overnight, giving Bannon and his co-hosts Raheem Kassam, Jason Miller, and Jack Maxey no notice on why the account has now been disabled. The group did not receive any explanation for the suspension.
BREAKING: Twitter has suspended Steve Bannon’s @WarRoomPandemic, the first podcast in America that warned about the danger of the coronavirus outbreak pic.twitter.com/k8e07XIgOK
— Jack Posobiec, IWO (@JackPosobiec) April 13, 2020
The account, which promoted clips from the show, launched in January amidst the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus in January. The show hosted numerous interviews with anti-Chinese party dissidents and experts on epidemiology and was prescient in its coverage of the viral pandemic while the mainstream news cycle was consumed by the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
Writing for War Room, the show’s co-host Raheem Kassam notes that the show is aired across a variety of distribution partners in the United States, including the John Fredricks Radio Network.
The show, which is syndicated as a podcast on most mainstream platforms, is also streamed on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope and has been subtitled in Mandarin for Chinese members of its audience. “If the CCP has that much impact on Jack Dorsey’s team and their decisions they should come out and say so outright,” said the spokesperson for the show. “That’s the only explanation. We don’t promote fake news or conspiracy theories. We simply point the fingers of responsibility squarely at the Chinese Communist Party.”
Twitter’s crackdown on the War Room: Pandemic account follows its deletions of tweets by Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and other conservative figures who have advocated for the use of hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment for the coronavirus.
UPDATE: Twitter has reinstated the account as of 1pm EST.
BREAKING: Twitter has reinstated our @WarRoomPandemic account.
— Raheem Kassam ? (@RaheemKassam) April 13, 2020
Though our follower count has magically gone from 22,060 to just 64. pic.twitter.com/eXYTbpR1Ca