Twitter says it permanently suspended a QAnon account belonging to a family friend of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, for “engaging in coordinated harmful activity”.
Twitter is in the middle of a broader crackdown on QAnon content and is attempting to reduce the amplification of accounts spreading “clear and well-documented informational, physical, societal and psychological offline harm on our service”.
BurnedSpy34, a prominent and prolific member of the Australian QAnon scene, was recently permanently suspended.
The man behind the account, Tim Stewart, regularly tweeted content associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory to his tens of thousands of followers, including bizarre and unfounded claims about Alexander Downer and Julie Bishop, among others.
“The account you mentioned below has been permanently suspended for engaging in coordinated harmful activity,” a Twitter spokeswoman said.
Last year, the Guardian revealed that the owner of the account was a long-standing family friend of the Australian prime minister and his wife, Jenny. The families’ association was driven by the friendship between Stewart’s wife and Jenny.
His wife worked on the prime minister’s staff in a publicly funded position but not in any policy or advisory capacity. There is no evidence she shares her husband’s views. It is not clear whether the employment arrangement is ongoing.
Twitter is understood to have removed 7,000 accounts in the past several weeks for breaching its rules against spam, platform manipulation, and/or ban evasion. Its broader actions are expected to reduce visibility for 150,000 accounts globally.
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.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) July 22, 2020
Two other accounts associated with BurnedSpy34 have also been removed.
The Twitter spokeswoman said Twitter is also no longer serving QAnon content and accounts in trends and recommendations to users. The digital giant is seeking to avoid highlighting QAnon activity in search and conversations and blocking URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on its platform.
“We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, and attempting to evade a previous suspension,” a spokeswoman said. “We will continue to review this activity across our service and update our rules and enforcement approach again if necessary.”
Stewart was approached for comment.
Last year, he said he had not attempted to influence Morrison or had conversations with him about any QAnon content.
“I have never spoken to Scott about anything of a political nature. I’m not an adviser. The idea of me talking to him about this ... it’s just not true,” he said.
The QAnon conspiracy is a sprawling and often incoherent set of beliefs that generally postulate that Donald Trump is secretly fighting a shadowy deep state, which is hiding satanic paedophile rings. QAnon followers believe that a secretive individual named Q leaves them clues on the internet to decipher.
The theory has been labelled dangerous and a potential motivator for domestic extremists in the US.
