Twitter takes down 200 Dutch QAnon accounts
On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it removed 70 thousand profiles that "primarily spread QAnon content". At least 200 of these profiles were traced back to Dutch users by NRC and University of Amsterdam (UvA).
Most of the Dutch accounts removed last week had the QAnon slogan "Where we go one, we go all", abbreviated in the hashtag #WWG1WGA, on their profile, likely making it easy for Twitter to track them down, according to the newspaper. Many called themselves Trump supporters and "Dutch Patriots".
NRC and UvA stored the tweets of a number of removed users shortly before they disappeared from the platform. According to the newspaper, the Dutch profiles kept alternating between American and Dutch themes. One user posted over 2,700 tweets and retweets about QAnon, Donald Trump, and how the Dutch government is apparently using the coronavirus to oppress civilians.
QAnon is a conspiracy movement that emerged in the United States and revolves around the belief that Donald Trump was chosen to defeat a satanic pedophile shadow government, according to NRC. In the US, QAnon supporters have been implicated in multiple violent incidents, including the storming of the Capitol earlier this month.
Twitter said that it removed the QAnon-linked accounts because they contributed to "the greater risk of danger" after the storming of the Capitol, the US parliament building. In a blog post, Twitter said that "misleading and false information surrounding the 2020 presidential election is the basis of violence in the country".
In November, Twitter also removed a bunch of QAnon accounts, including at least 90 Dutch ones.
