Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter account banned for good over Covid-19 misinformation

Greene is longtime purveyor of Covid-19 falsehoods and vaccine conspiracies

Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) speaks at a news conference at the U.S. Capitol Building (Getty Images)

Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was permanently banned from Twitter on Sunday after sharing misinformation related to Covid-19.

The right-wing Georgia lawmaker has had her account frozen multiple times in the past for spreading various falsehoods related to vaccines and the pandemic. This time, the ban is for good.

“We permanently suspended the account you referenced (@mtgreenee) for repeated violations of our Covid-19 misinformation policy. We’ve been clear that, per our strike system for this policy, we will permanently suspend accounts for repeated violations of the policy,” a spokesperson for the company told The Independent.

A screenshot of Ms Greene’s Twitter account obtained by The Independent showed a tweet from the congresswoman falsely claiming that the federal government was ignoring “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths”, citing data from the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

This is a conspiracy theory that has been debunked repeatedly; the VAERS system is open to public submission, and as a result the more than one million reports of injury or death among individuals who have received the Covid-19 vaccine are largely unverified by the federal government. The Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) website notes that VAERS “accepts reports of any adverse event following vaccination” regardless of whether or not the event can be proven to be linked to the vaccine itself.

Ms Greene responded to the news on Telegram, a platform favourited by right-wing audiences, writing: “[Rep] Maxine Waters can go to the streets and threaten violence on Twitter, [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] and [Rep] Ilhan [Omar] can bail out Black Lives Matter terrorists on Twitter, CNN and the rest of the Democrat Propaganda Media can spread Russia collusion lies, and just yesterday the Chief spokesman for terrorist IRGC can tweet mourning Soleimani, but I get suspended for tweeting VAERS statistics.”

The congresswoman retains access to the platform through an official account for her congressional office, @RepMTG, which is largely, if not entirely, operated by staff. The account banned on Sunday was a personal Twitter account, similar to ones operated by many politicians including President Joe Biden.

Twitter could end up taking similar steps by issuing strikes and eventually banning Ms Greene’s congressional Twitter account if she were to continue her spread of misinformation via that account. Ms Greene has occasionally mentioned Covid-19 and related topics from the official account, but largely sticks to statements expressing her opposition to the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates.

Ms Greene was previously suspended twice from the platform last year, in July and August, for similar violations of the company’s Covid-19 misinformation. Twitter forbids the sharing of any content considered to be “false or misleading information about Covid-19 which may lead to harm”, per its policies page.

One suspension in August stemmed from her false claim that the vaccines were “failing” to stop Covid-19, when in reality they offer elevated protection against transmission of the virus as well as the disease’s most dangerous symptoms in the cases of breakthrough infections. At the time, she claimed that the FDA “should not approve the covid vaccines” beyond the emergency authorisation previously issued by the agency, however, the FDA did just that later in August.

In addition to a previous suspension for the same reason a month earlier, Ms Greene also received a temporary ban in January of 2021 after sharing misinformation about two hotly-contested US Senate runoffs in Georgia, which were both won by Democrats after the state narrowly was won by Mr Biden in November of 2020.