Twitter suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene over Covid misinformation

Twitter has suspended Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account for 12 hours after she made a controversial comment that violated its policy on sharing misleading information about the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the weekend, Ms Greene said that Covid-19 “was not dangerous” for those under 65 who are not obese and “vaccine should not be required”.

A Twitter spokesperson said that the platform took “enforcement action on the account @mgtgreene for violations of Twitter’s rules, specifically the Covid-19 misleading information policy.” Her account will remain suspended until Tuesday.

In a statement to The New York Times, Ms Greene slammed the action by the social media giant, saying that “big tech companies are doing the bidding of the Biden regime to restrict our voices and prevent the spread of any message that isn’t state-approved”.

The action against her handle comes days after President Joe Biden slammed Facebook for failing to police coronavirus-related misinformation.

“They’re killing people,” said the president on 16 July. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated and that’s … they’re killing people.”

Facebook vice president for integrity Guy Rosen argued in a blog post on Saturday that the criticism of the Biden administration is unfounded and that “vaccine acceptance among Facebook users in the US has increased”.

Softening the blow of his earlier remark, President Biden on Monday appeared to walk back on his assertion as he said “Facebook isn’t killing people”.

Mr Biden clarified that he wanted the company to do more and meant to aim his criticism at the users of the site responsible for spreading misinformation about the disease and vaccines authorised by the Food and Drug Administration.

“It was pointed out that on Facebook … of all the misinformation [on the platform], 60 per cent of it is coming from 12 people,” Mr Biden said. “So I was asked that question about what do I think was happening.”

This is not the first time that Ms Greene’s Twitter handle has been suspended. Earlier this year, Twitter temporarily suspended her account after she posted a clip from an interview in which she expressed her support for debunked theories for electoral fraud during the presidential elections.