Twitter has permanently suspended the account of the conspiracy theorist David Icke for misleading Coronavirus posts.
68-year-old David Icke is a former British footballer and conspiracy theorist who believes a race of reptilians controls the planet, among other beliefs.
But now a spokesman for Twitter told the Guardian newspaper that it has permanently suspended the account of David Icke, because he had violated its rules regarding coronavirus misinformation
Icke had 382,000 followers on Twitter, and it comes after both Facebook and YouTube had terminated his accounts in May this year for exactly the same reason.
Icke is reported as having made unproven claims about Covid-19, including the hoary old chestnut that Coronavirus is linked to the rollout of 5G.
Icke has also reportedly headlined anti-lockdown rallies at Trafalgar Square in London.
Unfortunately, Icke’s Instagram page, which has 212,000 followers, is still active.
The global Coronavirus pandemic has unfortunately seen ill-informed celebrities wading in on the subject, which has not helped matters.
At the early stages of the pandemic, an American singer/songwriter claimed 5G networks were to blame for the Coronavirus pandemic.
She subsequently retracted her claims.
Other celebrities jumped on the bandwagon, including Amanda Holden who tweeted a link to an anti-5G petition to her almost 2 million followers.
Boxer Amir Khan and actor Woody Harrelson also published similar claims, and TV presenter Eamonn Holmes narrowly avoided Ofcom sanctions when he cast doubts on media reports that debunked the false rumour that 5G causes Coronavirus.
And those ‘theories’ supported by Icke and parroted by certain celebrities has resulted in real world damage.
Many mobile phone masts across the UK were torched or otherwise vandalised during the first wave of the pandemic, many of which were not even 5G equipped.
Vodafone UK’s chief executive Nick Jeffery also revealed that one of the attacked towers provided mobile connectivity to the Nightingale hospital in Birmingham, denying family the ability to say their goodbyes remotely to loved ones.
BT’s chief executive, Philip Jansen, who himself was struck down with Coronvirus, has previously pleaded for the “mindless idiots who truly believe that 5G and Covid-19 are linked” to stop their attacks.
Jansen said that BT has seen telephone poles wrapped in barbed wire to stop its engineers doing their job, even though they are fixed-line (landline) cables and nothing to do with the mobile network.
He also revealed that 39 BT engineers had been verbally or physically assaulted – including threats to kill.
YouTube meanwhile has banned all conspiracy theory videos that falsely link 5G networks to the spread of Coronavirus.
Twitter in April clamped down on reckless tweets “that incite people to engage in harmful activities after the mobile mast attacks.
Experts at the International Commission on Non‐Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) in 2020 declared that 5G was safe for human health.
The UK communications regulator Ofcom also carried out safety tests in the UK of 5G base stations and found that there is no danger to the public posed by electromagnetic energy (EME) levels.
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