U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Rifle, has regained control of her Twitter account after it was temporarily locked.
Boebert announced that her account had been locked in a screenshot she posted to Instagram on Wednesday morning. The screenshot said her personal account was locked as a result of unspecified violations of Twitter’s rules.
The screenshot said her account would be locked for six days, until just before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week. However, the lock was removed early for unspecified reasons. She attacked the temporary restrictions in a tweet after her account was unlocked.
“Twitter randomly shut my account down with no explanation. They do this to thousands of conservatives every single day,” the post read. “When the press reported the ban, it was lifted. What about the thousands of Americans who have been banned and are never heard from again?”
Boebert has recently come under fire for her staunch support of President Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud and her defense of him in the aftermath of the violence that broke out in the Capitol on Jan. 6.
She has also faced calls to resign as critics have accused her of inciting the violence through her repeated disputing of election results and her referencing the American Revolution on Twitter in the hours leading up to the attack on the Capitol. Boebert was also pictured in a now-deleted Instagram post with a number of people who later participated in the attack on the Capitol. Activists in Durango rallied last week against Boebert in one of several protests across the 3rd Congressional District.
Boebert’s account was merely locked, not suspended. When a Twitter account is locked, the user cannot tweet, retweet or like other tweets but is still able to view tweets and send direct messages, but the account still exists and the restrictions are lifted after a period of time.
Twitter recently made headlines for banning a number of high-profile accounts, including Trump’s. The social media giant said the bans were enacted in response to the violence last week, which many accused Trump of inciting. According to Twitter, the bans are intended to minimize the risk of future violence. However, a number of critics both in the United States and abroad have decried the bans as censorship, including Boebert herself. She decried Twitter’s wave of bans in a series of tweets.
“Big Tech has declared they are more powerful than the will of the American people,” she posted. “Unelected tech oligarchs should not have such massive power over global discourse while enjoying little to no oversight/accountability.”
It is unclear whether her official congressional account, which last posted Tuesday evening, was locked too, or if only her campaign account was restricted.
Her office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
John Purcell is an intern for The Durango Herald and The Journal in Cortez and a student at American University in Washington, D.C.
