A spokesperson for Twitter said the account violated the company's platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts.
The white nationalist group Identity Evropa was discovered to be posing as part of the antifa movement on social media while calling for violence during the George Floyd protests taking place across the country, Twitter said.
The newly created account "ANTIFA_US" was suspended after tweeting “Tonight’s the night, Comrades ... Tonight we say 'F*** The City' and we move into the residential areas ... the white hoods .... and we take what's ours.”
A spokesperson for Twitter told NBC the account violated the company's platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts. And the tweet incited violence, the spokesperson said.
Twitter also said that this isn’t the first time they have removed fake accounts linked to Identity Evropa, which the Southern Poverty Law Center says "is at the forefront of the racist 'alt-right's' effort to recruit white, college-aged men and transform them into the fashionable new face of white nationalism."
Antifa, short for anti-fascist, is the umbrella term for far-left leaning social groups that take direct action to fight fascism and the far-right.
President Trump on Sunday took to Twitter to say “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization."
Following protests in Portland last summer, Trump made similar remarks and called for officials to name the group a terror organization. On Monday morning, he blamed antifa by name for the violence, along with violent mobs, arsonists and looters. Later in the day, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters antifa is a "big element of this protest.”
Antifa is not an organization and does not have a hierarchical structure. There is no universal set of tactics that one could point to as a telltale sign of being done by antifa, but members tend to hold revolutionary and anti-authoritarian views, said Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University and author of "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook."
"They do different things at different times in different ways, some of which there is evidence of them breaking the law," Bray told CBS affiliate WKYT. Other times there is not."
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