CommentsMISINFORMATION - Twitter has banned for good the personal account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene because the Georgia Republican—a longtime purveyor of anti-vaccine and other dangerous conspiracies—refused to stop spreading deadly disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic.
"We permanently suspended Marjorie Taylor Greene for repeated violations of our Covid-19 misinformation policy," Twitter said Sunday in a statement, as first reported by CNN's Donie O'Sullivan. "We've been clear that, per our strike system for this policy, we will permanently suspend accounts for repeated violations of the policy."
According to O'Sullivan:
Greene most frequently tweeted from the handle @mtgreenee. She still has access to and can tweet from her official congressional account @RepMTG.
Twitter had previously temporarily restricted Greene's account for sharing misinformation about the 2020 presidential election and Covid-19.
In March, Twitter announced that it would permanently suspend accounts that received five or more "strikes," or notifications about posts containing misleading information about Covid-19 vaccines.
Nevertheless, Greene proceeded to keep spewing lies about the lifesaving jabs, including on Saturday, when she tweeted, falsely, that the federal government was ignoring "extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths," the New York Times reported.
Greene cited data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), but as The Independent noted on Sunday, "This is a conspiracy theory that has been debunked repeatedly."
"The VAERS system is open to public submission, and as a result the more than one million reports of injury or death among individuals who have received the Covid-19 vaccine are largely unverified by the federal government," reported the news outlet. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website "notes that VAERS 'accepts reports of any adverse event following vaccination' regardless of whether or not the event can be proven to be linked to the vaccine itself."
Numerous studies have shown that being fully inoculated against Covid-19 significantly reduces one's risk of hospitalization and mortality, but right-wing disinformation about vaccine efficacy and safety has contributed to lower vaccination rates and higher Covid-19 death rates in heavily Republican counties, public health experts say.
The GOP lawmaker responded to Twitter's decision on GETTR, the reactionary social media site launched by Jason Miller, who was the chief spokesperson for former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and a senior advisor to his failed 2020 bid.
"When Maxine Waters can go to the streets and threaten violence on Twitter, Kamala and Ilhan can bail out rioters on Twitter, and Chief spokesman for terrorist IRGC can tweet mourning Soleimani but I get suspended for tweeting VAERS statistics, Twitter is an enemy to America and can't handle the truth. That's fine, I'll show America we don't need them and it's time to defeat our enemies," Greene wrote.
Business Insider explained Greene's ad hominem attack:
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California has repeatedly been the target of criticism by conservatives for comments from 2018 where she encouraged people to "push back" on members of the Trump administration in public and "tell them they're not welcome anymore."
Greene also made an unsubstantiated connection concerning Vice President Kamala Harris and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and their support of the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a nonprofit organization that assists low-income individuals who need money for bail. Some conservatives have equated support of the Fund to a desire to bail out rioters who destroyed property after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis last year.
The permanent suspension of one of Greene's Twitter accounts comes almost a year after Trump was booted from the social media platform. Trump was banned due to fears that he would incite more violence following a failed coup attempt last January 6, when a far-right mob stormed the Capitol in a deadly effort to prevent Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.
It also comes amid a tsunami of Covid-19 cases around the nation and world, as infections are being driven to all-time highs by the ultra-transmissible Omicron variant. More than 824,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the U.S., and the disease has claimed almost 5.5 million lives globally.
(Kenny Stancil is a staff writer for Common Dreams where this article was first published.)