Twitter has suspended the accounts of Virus Truth leader Willem Engel for an indefinite period on Tuesday afternoon. Engel had tens of thousands of followers on the social medium. This weekend, the anti-corona measures activist and conspiracy theorist received a warning from Twitter about a tweet in which he revealed the address of the now sworn minister Sigrid Kaag (Finance, D66).
It is unclear whether sharing the minister’s address is the reason for the suspension. Twitter reports that the “temporary suspension” is related to “platform manipulation”. That term is usually used to indicate holding two accounts with similar content.
The call to ban Engel from the platform grew early this week after an intimidating ‘doxing’ tweet to the D66 leader, who had a conspiracy theor with a torch at the door a few days earlier. D66 has announced that Kaag is filing a report. Doxing, revealing private information to intimidate someone, is a hacker term and is considered a code of conduct violation by Twitter.
The company has taken measures against doxing since last year, but normally a warning follows first. That also happened to Engel last weekend, who subsequently deleted his tweet. But on Tuesday, Twitter intervened more rigorously. Opposite Nu.nl Angel announces to go to courtif he doesn’t get his accounts back.
Permanent suspension
In the message in which he revealed Kaag’s address via a land registry registration, Engel suggested that the property had been financed by a terrorist organization. In another tweet, he calls Kaag a “coupler” [sic]. Against it AD said Angel Monday that he should have made the address details illegible, which he did a little later when he posted the message on his second account. He said he had no intention of encouraging people to visit Kaag.
Anyone who violates Twitter’s rules of conduct multiple times runs the risk of losing his or her account, a spokesperson said. The severity of the penalties increases after each violation. The fifth violation will result in a permanent suspension.
The Kaag tweet is not the first that Engel had to remove. Last June, in a message on the platform, he made a link between corona vaccinations and the cardiac arrest of Danish football player Christian Eriksen during the European Football Championship. The tweet was removed after his account was temporarily ‘frozen’. He has been tweeting from another account ever since, until its freezing last weekend.
Engels’ call to photograph GGD employees at so-called injection boxes “for later, shall we say”, was not punished by Twitter. GGD Hollands Midden would, however, file a report, which, according to a spokesperson, has been “merged” with other reports against Engel. An action at the end of last year to make a massive declaration against Engel for, among other things, incitement resulted in 20,000 declarations. Engel in turn takes steps against the initiator.
A Twitter account that harassed people through doxing, Visor on Links, was shut down earlier last year. The Public Prosecution Service is investigating the person or persons behind this anonymous account, after followers pasted stickers on houses of ‘left-wing people’ with the text: ‘Observed by followers of Vizier on the Left’. The doxing of right-wing radical figures also occurs in extreme left circles.
Disclosure of private information
An almost unanimous House of Representatives called on outgoing minister Grapperhaus to come up with a bill against the disclosure of private data with the aim of ‘intimidating fear’. Only Forum for Democracy voted against. This bill still has to pass the Council of State. Minister Dilan Yesilgöz (Justice, VVD) told NOS on Tuesday that she wants to vote on the law before the summer.
At present, doxing is therefore not yet a criminal offence, although circumstances are conceivable in which a conviction can be made via other legal provisions. When deliberately unmasking undercover agents, the court in Rotterdam ruled last year that there was an attempted coercion of office, a crime against public authorities. Sedition is already punishable, but this requires proof of incitement to misconduct or criminal offenses towards the victim. In doxing, intimidation is enough: to instill fear. According to the bill, a maximum sentence of one year in prison can be imposed.
A civil case can already be brought in the event of a suspected infringement of privacy. That rarely happens, says privacy expert and media lawyer Otto Volgenant of Boekx Advocaten. He points to a Telegraph-journalist whose number appeared on the site of Stichting Loterij Loss.nl after critical publications about this foundation. “What the criminal law adds is that sanctions can be really deterrent, and so hopefully you prevent data from being disclosed,” says Volgenant. “Convicts will not soon go to prison for a year, but the idea that you can get a criminal record and have to answer to a criminal court scares people.”
The fact that addresses of people can also be found through other public sources does not mean that doxing is therefore less objectionable. Precisely because it is “relatively easy to retrieve personal information of individuals via internet sources”, the law is necessary, according to the Ministry of Justice. Politicians are explicitly mentioned as people who need to be protected from this practice.
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