Daily Friend columnist Ivo Vegter’s satire, ‘Inside the vaccine conspiracy: a confession’, published last week, earned the writer a 12-hour Twitter ban for purportedly propagating the very conspiracies targeted in his piece.
Even when he pointed this out in an appeal, Twitter stuck to its guns.
Vegter told the Daily Friend yesterday: ‘I was banned from Twitter for 12 hours for a tweet in which I merely referred to my recent column as being “about vaccines and the belief that Bill Gates is behind a depopulation and/or a 5G tracking conspiracy”.
‘In my appeal, I pointed out that my article actually debunked the conspiracy theory, but on review they concluded that my tweet really did violate their “policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19”.’
With a ‘strike against me’, he said, ‘any further violations could earn me a permanent ban. Given that I cannot predict what they will misunderstand in future, this is a significant threat from the platform where I have built up my following.’
Vegter said he knew of at least one other Twitter user who was similarly banned ‘for actually linking to my column, which I had not done in the tweet that got me banned’.
Vegter added: ‘It is clear that neither the Twitter AI nor its human mods are capable of distinguishing satire from the fake news it is meant to debunk. Imagine how Twitter would react to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. [Published in 1729, Swift’s essay suggested that the poverty-stricken Irish could ease their economic plight by selling their children to the rich as food.]
‘Worse, my tweet merely mentioned a topic, without stating an opinion for or against it, so it could not have contained misleading or harmful information at all.’
This was ‘an excellent reason for private companies to steer cleer of the responsibility of censoring content beyond blocking crude racism or clear incitement to violence. If they cannot read for meaning, they cannot reliably determine what is and is not “misleading or potentially harmful”.’
The case also ‘underscores why “cancel culture” is so toxic. It silences even the views that they seek to promote.’