Twitter Suspends Senate Candidate Shiva Ayyadurai's Account

CAMBRIDGE, MA — Shiva Ayyadurai, a Belmont resident who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2018 and again in 2020, has been blocked from Twitter.

"Account suspended," his Twitter profile, @va_shiva, read Thursday. "Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules."

Ayyadurai's tweets and photos are gone from his timeline.

Twitter did not specify why his account was suspended. Ayyadurai said he believes it is because he tweeted about Secretary of State William Galvin and Michelle Tassinari, the state's director of elections.

"Twitter was coerced by the Government - Secretary of State Galvin and State Election Director Tassinari because I exposed TASSINARI violated Federal Law by deleting ballot images," Ayyadurai said in an email. "[It] forced Twitter to do this. Only the Secretary of State can & must restore my Twitter account; otherwise, we live in Putin’s Russia or Communist China."

Ayyadurai accused Tassinari of deleting a million electronic ballots during the 2020 Massachusetts primary and general election and filed a lawsuit against Galvin and Tassinari to that affect late last year. Galvin and Tassinari have denied the claim, noting the state's ballots are paper.

Ayyadurai has been accused of using social media to spread misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, including posting the virus has been spread by the "deep state" and can be treated with vitamin C. He accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of being a "Deep State Plant" and called for him to be fired.

Ayyadurai was born in India. He holds four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including a PhD in biological engineering. He claims to have invented email as a high school student in New Jersey in the late 1970s, which has been widely disputed.

In his 2018 campaign against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Ayyadurai appeared in a livestream with Matthew Colligan, who was photographed holding a torch and marching in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, which has been widely condemned as supporting white supremacy. His campaign slogan in 2018 was "Only a real Indian can defeat a fake Indian," a reference to Warren's claim she is of Cherokee descent.

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