Twitter timeout for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene COVID tweets

ATLANTA — Twitter is giving Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene a 12-hour timeout, saying some of her tweets violated the social media site’s policy against misinformation regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

Twitter suspended the Republican from Georgia late Monday after President Joe Biden urged tech companies to take stronger action against bogus claims about vaccines that are “killing people.” Twitter has defended its efforts to keep dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 off its site, saying it has removed thousands of tweets and challenged millions of accounts worldwide.

Greene appears to have been disciplined under the “strike” system Twitter launched in March, using a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify content about the coronavirus that is misleading enough to cause harm to people. Two or three strikes earn a 12-hour account lock; four strikes prompt a weeklong suspension, and five or more strikes can get someone permanently removed from Twitter.

“We took enforcement action on the account @mtgreenee for violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically the Covid-19 misleading information policy,” the company said in an email.

One of Greene’s latest tweets that Twitter labeled misleading claimed that the virus “is not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65.” According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people under 65 account for nearly 250,000 of the U.S. deaths involving COVID-19.

U.S. cases of COVID-19 last week increased by 17,000 nationwide over a 14-day period for the first time since late fall, and an increase in death historically follows a spike in illness. Much of the worsening problem is being driven by the delta variant first identified in India, that has since hit the United Kingdom and other countries, said U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

Calls to the congresswoman’s offices in Washington and in her north Georgia district reached messages saying her mailboxes are full and can’t accept new messages.

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