Twitter practices a five-strike system for policy violations where the first one only offers a warning, the next three strikes impose temporary lockouts, and the final strike results in a permanent suspension. The social media platform has been recently cracking down on COVID-19 misinformation too and spreading fake news on this topic is also a policy violation. Today, Twitter has permanently suspended Republican U.S. congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene's account due to her fifth strike, which was incurred from breaching the company's COVID-19 misinformation policies.
According to The New York Times, Greene's personal account was suspended after she tweeted a misleading chart based on unverified, self-reported, raw data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a government database that is considered obsolete. This was Greene's fifth strike, with earlier strikes issued this year for saying that vaccines are failing and that COVID-19 is not that dangerous so vaccines shouldn't be mandated, among other things. The report indicates that the Georgian congresswoman later posted on Telegram that Twitter "is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth".
Greene's account suspension only extends to her personal one, and not the official government account @RepMTG, which is still live. That said, that account hasn't tweeted since December 24, 2021, so it remains to be seen if congresswoman Greene will resort to using that account to tweet her thoughts on COVID-19.
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