Getty Marjorie Taylor Greene
Twitter on Sunday permanently suspended the personal account of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, after the company said she had violated its Covid-19 misinformation policies.
Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She included a misleading chart that pulled information from a government database of unverified raw data called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a decades-old system that relies on self-reported cases from patients and health care providers.
Twitter said that Ms. Greene had a fifth “strike,” which meant that her account will not be restored. The company had issued her a fourth strike in August after she falsely posted that the vaccines were “failing.” Ms. Greene was given a third strike less than a month before that when she had tweeted that Covid-19 was not dangerous and that vaccines should not be mandated.
Ms. Greene’s official Congressional account, @RepMTG, remains active because tweets from that account did not violate the service’s rules.
“We’ve been clear that, per our strike system for this policy, we will permanently suspend accounts for repeated violations of the policy,” Katie Rosborough, a Twitter spokeswoman, said in a statement. The company allows accounts to submit an appeal and will potentially reverse the suspension if the violating post is proven to be factual.
On the alternative social messaging platform Telegram, Ms. Greene said that Twitter “is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth.”
Her suspension comes as coronavirus cases have surged again in the United States from the highly infectious Omicron variant. New York State recorded over 85,000 new coronavirus cases on the last day of 2021, the highest one-day total in the state since the pandemic began, officials announced on Saturday.
Twitter has long banned users from sharing misinformation that could lead to harm. In rare cases, the company has permanently banned high-profile accounts, including the account of former President Donald J. Trump, over a risk of “further incitement of violence” after a mob of Trump loyalists stormed the U.S. Capitol last Jan. 6.
There is currently no evidence of widespread major side effects from the coronavirus vaccines. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine could trigger a rare blood clotting disorder now linked to dozens of cases and at least nine deaths in the United States in the past year. The agency recommended using other approved vaccines instead.