Twitter temporarily suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Tuesday after the Georgia Republican posted a tweet that claimed vaccines don’t reduce the spread of COVID-19.
“These vaccines are failing & do not reduce the spread of the virus & neither do masks,” Greene tweeted, contradicting the scientific community and calling for the FDA to refuse to approve vaccines. Greene’s tweet remains up on her Twitter feed, but it’s paired with a misinformation warning from the company that points users to information from the CDC.
Twitter told TechCrunch the tweet was “labeled in line with [Twitter’s] COVID-19 misleading information policy” and will result in Greene’s account being frozen in read-only mode for seven days in light of “repeated violations” of Twitter’s platform rules. Last month, Greene was suspended for 12 hours for falsely claiming that the virus posed little threat to healthy people under the age of 65.
The new suspension is Greene’s fourth slap on the wrist from Twitter under its current strike-based system for COVID-19-related misinformation. Greene is a repeat rule-breaker on the platform, which puts her account in jeopardy of a permanent ban if she offends a fifth time after her account is reinstated.
In spite of a widely available trio of vaccines proven to dramatically and effectively reduce the severity of COVID-19 infections or prevent them outright, COVID cases are on the rise in the U.S. in a major way. Florida continues to break its own record for daily infections, topping the numbers the state saw during the pre-vaccine months of 2020.
Online misinformation continues to play a major role in discouraging Americans from seeking the vaccine, even with the highly contagious Delta variant on the rise. In states like Alabama, where vaccination rates are some of the lowest in the nation, those numbers have begun trending up as residents realize how vulnerable they are to the new variant, which is ravaging pockets of the population that haven’t yet sought the shot.