3 years ago387A week after false claims of a stolen U.S. presidential election drove a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter is allowing a far-right supporter of President Donald Trump to claim the election was stolen.
Anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller, in a tweet Monday about banks freezing political donations after a pro-Trump mob stormed the seat of the U.S. government, said the banks’ decision was, “Further proof the election was stolen.”
Geller, who has claimed that former President Barack Obama is a jihadist Muslim, was banned from entering the United Kingdom in 2013 to attend a far-right rally, with the British government saying it would not stand for “extremism in any form.” In 2015, she organized a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas, which was attacked by two gunmen, one with a declared allegiance to the Islamic State, who were killed by security. A Boston man was later sentenced to decades in prison for plotting to behead Geller.
A Geller tweet on Sunday to her 189,000 followers linked to a blog post in which she called the events in Washington, D.C., where five people including a police officer died, “a couple of crackpots who pranked at the Capitol.”
Twitter, asked by this news organization Monday about Geller’s tweet claiming the election was stolen, said it would look into the matter. Twitter’s “civic integrity policy” bans “unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results.” Twitter said in a blog post Tuesday that it had imposed the policy because “misleading and false information surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election has been the basis for incitement to violence around the country.”
Related Articles
Google bans two Steve Bannon YouTube channels after Trump lawyer Giuliani claims stolen electionFacebook, Twitter ban Trump after violent mob storms Capitol. Critics demand moreManatee spotted in Florida river with ‘Trump’ etched into its backAlthough Geller’s tweet appears to violate that policy, it was still up Tuesday afternoon.In the wake of the Capitol insurrection, which followed months of claims by Trump and his supporters that the election of Joe Biden was rigged, Twitter permanently banned Trump. The San Francisco micro-blogging company said Tuesday that it’s permanently suspended more than 70,000 accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory holding that Trump is waging war against Satan-worshipping pedophiles.
Menlo Park social media giant Facebook has suspended Trump until at least after Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration, and said Monday it’s removing “stop the steal” messaging falsely claiming the election was rigged. Geller, on her pro-Trump website, referred to the company’s actions as “the great purge,” adding, “and the Democrat communists haven’t even take (sic) hold of the levels (sic) of power.”
English (US)