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Washington (AP) - After the storm on the US Capitol, Twitter tightened the crackdown on supporters of the conspiracy theory QAnon.
The short message service announced that more than 70,000 accounts have been deleted since last Friday.
In many cases one person operated several profiles.
In the past few days, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other people close to President Donald Trump complained that they had suddenly lost tens of thousands of followers.
The central claim of the QAnon supporters is that there is a conspiracy against Trump in the deeper layers of the US government apparatus ("deep state") against which he is fighting.
They also often claim that prominent Democratic Party politicians in the United States have been treated with hormones made from the blood of children.
One strand of this was the “Pizzagate” theory, which led to an armed man stormed into a pizzeria in Washington at the end of 2016 in order to free children allegedly held captive.
He was arrested by the police and no one was injured.
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When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, people with QAnon symbols were also seen in photos and videos.
In the past few weeks, Trump's false claims about alleged electoral fraud were picked up and spun on in the scene.
The "Q" has been on flags and banners at many of the President's rallies for years.
Trump always refused to distance himself from the conspiracy movement.
In August 2020, for example, he said: "I understand that they like me very much, which I appreciate."
Then in October he claimed, "I don't know anything about QAnon."
But he heard "that they are very much against pedophilia, and I agree with that".
In the November election, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had publicly supported QAnon, entered the House of Representatives for Republicans.
Twitter, Facebook and Youtube have been taking action against QAnon ideas since the summer.
Now Amazon has also announced that it will ban products with symbols of movement from the platform.
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After the storm on the Capitol, Twitter and Facebook had already blocked Trump's accounts until further notice.
The outgoing president also lost a potential next online platform.
The Twitter copy Parler, which was popular with its followers because of loose content rules, went offline after Amazon terminated its services as an infrastructure provider.
Parler filed a lawsuit against Amazon on Monday.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210112-99-991817 / 2
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