Clinton accuser Juanita Broaddrick has been kicked off Twitter over her COVID-19 tweets, joining the growing list of prominent conservatives jettisoned from the tech platform for violations of its policies.
Twitter confirmed Monday that Ms. Broaddrick had been permanently suspended after she informed Fox News that she had been locked out of her account, named @atensnut, short for “a tennis nut.”
“We permanently suspended the account referenced for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Washington Times. “We’ve been clear that, per our strike system for this policy, we will permanently suspend accounts for repeated violations of the policy.”
The April 9 tweet that triggered the ban said: “When will this vaccine crap be over? Big Pharma has profited enough for the next hundred years. Stop pushing vaccines that don’t work and alter DNA.”
Twitter’s policy forbids tweets “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”
Ms. Broaddrick is hardly the only person on social media to express misgivings about the COVID-19 vaccine, but she may be one of the biggest names.
In 1999, she said that Bill Clinton raped her in a hotel room in 1978 while she was a nursing-home owner and volunteer for his Arkansas gubernatorial campaign, a charge his attorney denied.
She wrote a 2018 book, “You’d Better Put Some Ice on That: How I Survived Being Raped by Bill Clinton” and often has been held up as a victim of Democratic Party hypocrisy on sexual-assault allegations during the #MeToo movement.
Ms. Broaddrick is also a strong supporter of former President Donald Trump, who was banned from Twitter in January 2021, two months after his presidential reelection defeat.
Other conservative accounts permanently ousted from Twitter include those of former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon; My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell; Project Veritas; and Project Veritas president James O’Keefe.
In just three days during March, Twitter suspended the following for referring to Biden administration official Rachel Levine, who transitioned to female in 2011, as a man: the Babylon Bee, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
All three accounts remain frozen.
Ms. Broaddrick had more than 530,000 followers at the time of her suspension, according to screenshots.
The COVID-19 shots are mRNA [messenger RNA] vaccines, which “teach our cells how to make a protein that will trigger an immune response inside our bodies,” the Centers for Disease Control says on its Website.
“They do not affect or interact with our DNA in any way,” the CDC writes. “mRNA never enters the nucleus of the cell where our DNA (genetic material) is located, so it cannot change or influence our genes.”
Conservatives have urged Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a staunch critic of Twitter’s speech limits, to take action after he became last week the platform’s largest shareholder.
“We need free speech back whatever it takes,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, Colorado Republican, said in a Monday tweet. “@ElonMusk, don’t let us down.”
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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