Twitter suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene again, this time over misleading vaccine tweets
Congress' loudest Facebook aunt, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, has landed herself her second Twitter suspension of the year for tweeting false or misleading information about COVID-19 vaccinations.
Greene posted two quote tweets on July 18 and 19, adding her own claims that vaccines that protect against serious illness and death from COVID-19 are "controversial" and "NON-FDA approved", calling them "human experimentation" and asserting that COVID-19 is "not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65."
Vaccines available in the U.S. have been authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Authority, and are safe and effective. COVID-19 has caused serious short- and long-term illness and death in people of all ages around the world, including over 110,000 Americans under the age of 65 who have died to date.
Both Greene's tweets remain available on her account, but have had Twitter's anti-misinformation fact checking labels applied to them, marking them as "misleading" and linking to more reliable information on vaccine safety.
Twitter put Greene's account into "read-only mode" for a period of 12 hours for violating the platform's policy on misleading COVID-19 information. This is a form of enforcement action where the account is limited to seeing tweets on their timeline and sending direct messages to people who follow them, and cannot tweet, retweet, or like tweets.
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Misleading information on COVID-19, a Twitter spokesperson noted in an email to Mashable, includes "research findings (such as misrepresentations of or unsubstantiated conclusions about statistical data) used to advance a specific narrative that diminishes the significance of the disease."
Greene was previously suspended for 12 hours in January of this year for sharing false or misleading information about the 2020 U.S. election, aka "multiple violations of [Twitter's] civic integrity policy". Under Twitter's strike-based system, suspensions of this length are the standard enforcement action for second and third strikes — meaning that next time Greene crosses the line, she's facing a 7-day account lock, and a permanent suspension for any strikes after that.
Greene has made a habit of making false, misleading, and incendiary claims in her six months in the House. In addition to her continued support for the "Big Lie" that President Joe Biden's win over Donald Trump in the November election was illegitimate, she has also compared mask requirements on Capitol Hill to the Holocaust and suggested that California's increasingly intense wildfires are ignited by laser beams from solar generators orbiting Earth.
Greene's home state of Georgia, like all 50 U.S. states, is currently facing a new wave of rising case numbers thanks to the highly transmissible Delta variant, with the Peach State clocking a 291 percent increase in new cases in the two weeks to July 19. Less than half of the state's adults are fully vaccinated.
Topics Social Media Politics
Caitlin is Mashable's Australian Editor. She has written for The Guardian, Junkee, and any number of plucky little music and culture publications that were run on the smell of an oily rag and have since been flushed off the Internet like a dead goldfish by their new owners. She also worked at Choice, Australia's consumer advocacy non-profit and magazine, and as such has surprisingly strong opinions about whitegoods. She enjoys big dumb action movies, big clever action movies, cult Canadian comedies set in small towns, Carly Rae Jepsen, The Replacements, smoky mezcal, revenge bedtime procrastination, and being left the hell alone when she's reading.
