Twitter Bans Official Arizona Audit Account and Other Audit Accounts

 

Twitter permanently suspended the official account of the Arizona Senate’s audit of Maricopa County ballots, along with several other audit accounts on Tuesday. The official account, @ArizonaAudit, is offline, with a message stating it is suspended, as is a second account that appears affiliated with the audit, @AuditWarRoom.

Four more accounts associated with audits taking place in Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Georgia were banned, along with some accounts that were fundraising for the audit. One was run by One America News Network’s Christina Bobb. Bobb’s Voices & Votes raised $150,000 for the audit. Bobb tweeted, “They are blocking the release of audit information on Twitter.”

Twitter did not respond to several conservative news sites that inquired about the suspension. However, the social media giant told BuzzFeed News that the accounts were permanently suspended for violating the Twitter rules on platform manipulation and spam.

Sen. Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff) tweeted that she will be next.

Earlier this month, Rogers said Arizona’s electors should be recalled and a new election held.

The Arizona Senate conducted a hearing on the audit earlier this month, where Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan testified that over 74,000 mail-in ballots came in that had no record of being sent out, nearly 4,000 votes came from individuals who registered to vote after the deadline, around 18,000 voters were removed from the rolls after voting, and over 11,000 voters disappeared from the rolls temporarily for a month after the election.

The Arizona Senate then issued another subpoena to Maricopa County demanding ballot envelopes or ballot envelope images, voter records, and routers or router images from the 2020 election. Maricopa County refused to cooperate with the audit initially and ignored the Senate’s first subpoena for the ballots and voting machines, forcing the Senate to go to court to obtain them. The new subpoena also requests all findings concerning any systems breach that took place within six months of the election, as well as all usernames and passwords for machines used in the election.

Senate President Karen Fann (R-Prescott) said in a statement on Tuesday, “Maricopa County continues to withhold vital information from the public and the auditors which has created additional costs, months of delays and a lack of transparency on their part. Instead of working with the Senate, our constituents, and the auditors, Maricopa County has engaged in a social media campaign to try to control the narrative, instead of providing the whole truth, facts and items required to be produced by the legal subpoenas.”

A recent poll from OH Insights found that 62% of Republicans in Arizona believe the audit will show that Donald Trump won the state. The audits are catching on around the country, with Florida State Rep. Anthony Sabatini calling for one in the state’s five largest counties.

Social media has been under fire in recent years for banning conservatives and Republicans. A Quilette study from 2019 found that Twitter bans conservatives over liberals at a ratio of 21 to 1. Twitter permanently banned Trump on January 8, in response to the riot at the U.S. Capitol, and conducted a massive purge of users on the right. Conservative personality Terrence K. Williams said he lost 100,000 followers the next day due to the purge. Twitter stated later that it targeted accounts that had shared QAnon material. Other prominent conservatives banned in the aftermath include Sidney Powell, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn.

The Arizona Audit account had almost 100,000 followers and the Audit War Room account had over 40,000. The Audit War Room posted on Instagram that followers can find the account on Telegram and GETTR.

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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at the Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].

 

 

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