Marjorie Taylor Greene claims Elon Musk will restore her banned Twitter account
Far-right congresswoman’s personal account was banned in early January
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Your support makes all the difference.Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was among those on the right celebrating Elon Musk’s impending takeover of Twitter on Monday.
The Georgia representative saw her personal account permanently banned from the site on 2 January of this year after she repeatedly used the account to share false or easily disprovable claims about Covid-19, including a blatantly false assertion that the Covid-19 vaccine was dangerous and leading to thousands of deaths in the US.
On Monday, she predicted that a purchase of the company by billionaire Mr Musk would result in that ban being lifted.
“Prepare for blue check mark full scale meltdown after @elonmusk seals the deal and I should get my personal Twitter account restored,” she wrote.
The Independent has reached out to Twitter for comment. The company announced on Monday afternoon that it would be sold to Mr Musk for around $44bn.
Ms Greene’s repeated violations of Twitter’s content policies were well-documented prior to her ban. She has made just about every false claim in the book regarding the Covid-19 vaccines available in the US — she has claimed that they aren’t effective, that they are dangerous, and that they are not approved by the FDA — all nonsense, which the Georgia congresswoman has continued to spread in media interviews and on other platforms.
America has lost more than 1,000,000 people to the virus since the beginning of 2020 and many of those deaths were preventable, according to public health experts, were it not for the influence of bad faith misinformation about the virus and a wide range of individual issues related to the pandemic that had the overall effect of lessening public trust in health experts, sowing doubt in effective ways to prevent the virus from spreading, and even led to confrontations between furious Covid-19 patients and medical professionals as the former in some cases refused to believe that they had Covid or insisted on treatment through unproven and ineffective means.
In 2021 the US Surgeon General under Joe Biden even took the rare step of declaring Covid-19 misinformation a public health threat in an effort to spur US tech giants to take the matter seriously.
Ms Greene’s embrace of conspiracies is hardly limited to Covid, however, as she is known as one of the top promoters of Donald Trump’s falsehoods about his 2020 election defeat in Congress.
She is one of many Republicans who supported efforts to overturn the election but on January 6 was one of many GOP members of Congress who desperately pleaded with the White House to call off the president’s supporters.
"Mark I was just told there is an active shooter on the first floor of the Capitol Please tell the President to calm people This isn't the way to solve anything,” she wrote in a text to Mark Meadows published on Monday by CNN.
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