Twitter permanently suspends pro-Arizona audit accounts, but not due to their content

Although it has been nine months since President Joe Biden was elected the 2020 U.S. president, the foul stench of Trump's administration's death lingers. Twitter finally opened some windows and permanently suspended eight accounts that pushed for auditing of the election results.These bans were placed on the grounds that they spread dangerous misinformation or undermine the American democratic system. The end result is still the same.BuzzFeed News first reported that the accounts were suspended by @arizonaaudit and @AuditWarRoom. These accounts, as their names suggest were created to promote the Republican-led audit of Arizona's election and push for audits in other states. The official Twitter account @arizonaaudit was actually the one that the audit was being conducted. Official government officials had linked to it previously.Twitter confirmed the suspensions in a statement to Mashable, confirming Republicans' excessive sense of victimhood. The social media company said that it did not decide to suspend the accounts based on the content of the accounts.Mashable was informed by a Twitter spokesperson that the accounts were suspended permanently for violating Twitter's rules on platform manipulation, spam and other violations.Twitter's platform manipulation policy and spam policy does not address content issues related to misleading election information. This would fall under its civic integrity policies. This policy prohibits people from creating multiple accounts for overlapping purposes and posting identical content across them. It doesn't matter whether these audit accounts were posting civic misinformation or the entire text of The Lord of the Rings. Twitter would respond the same under this policy.Twitter declined to comment on whether any particular incident led to the suspensions. Although @AuditWarRoom was operating since May, @arizonaaudit was not. However, an Instagram post by Audit War Room indicated that six other Twitter accounts were created last week. This is likely to have attracted more attention from the big bird.Trump supporters who are determined in their dissociation of reality and the Arizona audit have made it a key theme of their Arizona audit. Since the November 2020 election in Arizona, the ballots of Maricopa County have been audited four more times. This includes a partial recount, a hand recount and two additional audits by independent accredited experts. In March, Republicans hired private contractors in order to review Maricopa County's results, again looking for evidence of widespread election fraud.