Twitter has suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's account for 12 hours after saying she posted tweets violating its policy on sharing misleading information about COVID-19.
The company said the Georgia Republican's account was to be suspended on Tuesday after she posted tweets Sunday and Monday that the company said contained misinformation about the disease and vaccines, reports The New York Times.
Twitter suspended Greene's account on Monday and said the block would be lifted Tuesday. The site left the posts in question online, but tagged them as containing misinformation about the disease and vaccines and gave a link for information from health officials.
In one of the tweets, posted early Monday, Greene argued that COVID-19 is not dangerous for people younger than the age of 65 who are not obese and said vaccines should not be required.
Her message was posted while quoting a thread by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who relayed a message he'd gotten from a member of the military concerning compulsory COVID vaccines.
The other tweet was posted on Sunday when Greene argued that no entity should "force NON-FDA approved vaccines or masks" but should "instead help people protect their health by defeating obesity, which will protect them from covid complications & death, and many other health problems. We should invest in health, not human experimentation."
A Twitter spokesman said in a statement that the company "took enforcement action on the account @mtgreenee for violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically the Covid-19 misleading information policy."
Greene said in a statement that companies like Twitter are working with the Biden White House to attack free speech and are "doing the bidding of the Biden regime to restrict our voices and prevent the spread of any message that isn't state-approved," reports The Times.
Twitter has been banning users who share misinformation, issuing a policy in March explaining its penalities.
A 12-hour ban, like the one imposed on Greene, is the response for users who have gotten two or three "strikes," or notices about their posts. After four strikes, users are suspended for seven days, and after five, Twitter bans the user permanently.
Twitter also bans users for other violations, including when it barred former President Donald Trump permanently in January when it said his social media posts had allegedly played a role in inciting violence during the Jan. 6 incidents at the Capitol.
Facebook has also suspended Trump's account, and he argues that the companies are censoring him and has filed class-action lawsuits against them, Google, and the tech giants' CEOs.
Greene was also suspended from Twitter in April, but the company blamed that on a mistake from its automated systems, not on her posts, and she tweeted that the company was lying once her suspension was lifted.
The congresswoman's suspension comes after President Joe Biden last week called on social media companies to take more action to stop the spread of misinformation about the vaccine, saying that sites like Facebook are "killing people." "The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they’re killing people," Biden said.
Facebook argued back that Biden's attack was unfounded, and on Monday, the president amended his criticism, saying that some of the site's users, not Facebook itself, are responsible for spreading misinformation. However, he still called on the site to fight the "outrageous misinformation" users are spreading rather than acting personally insulted.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.