Twitter suspended Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for 12 hours on Sunday for violating rules regarding misinformation introduced by the social media site following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 that resulted in the deaths of five people.
Greene, a representative from Georgia, posted a Twitter thread on Sunday filled with conspiracy theories about the Senate runoff elections held in her state earlier this month, which saw Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue lose their seats to Democrat challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. The victory in the longtime Republican-controlled state gave the Democrats control of the Senate with 50 seats and incoming Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker.
Twitter said in a statement that Greene’s tweets violated the site’s “civic integrity policy,” leading the site to block users from replying or retweeting the tweets due to a “risk of violence.” The decision comes days after Twitter shut down over 70,000 accounts for promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory and other baseless election conspiracy theories, including President Donald Trump.
Greene is a newly elected member of the House of Representatives, though she has for years posted about conspiracy theories such as “Pizzagate,” which claims that some Democrat leaders were secretly hosting a human-trafficking ring. Greene denounced Twitter’s move in a statement claiming conservatives should not be “scared into submission by Socialists who want to end their way of life.”
“Conservative Americans shouldn’t be afraid to speak their mind. They shouldn’t have to fear being cancelled by American corporations where they work, do business, and use services,” she said.