Last week President Trump retweeted one of his followers who turned a viral video into satirical commentary on today’s politics and its representation by the mainstream media. Today that user was issued a “take down” order for that video (for copyright infringement). A short time later he was banned from Twitter altogether.
The user, @carpedonktum, whose real name is Logan Cook, said that he always honors take down orders, known officially as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) violations, and has never uploaded content he was ordered to remove.
“I have ALWAYS complied with DMCA takedown rules, and I have submitted counterclaims when necessary, but I have NEVER uploaded content that has been removed. I have abided by the community guidlines, and followed the rules. It doesn’t matter. I have been banned for being effective and they won’t even look me in the eye as they do it,” Cook said.
Cook is famous for making memes that usually have Democrats and the mainstream media as their targets and has been retweeted often by the President.
Twitter says he has repeatedly violated the platform’s copyright infringement policy. “Per our copyright policy, we respond to valid copyright complaints sent to us by a copyright owner or their authorized representatives,” Twitter told The Daily Beast. “The account was permanently suspended for repeated violations of this policy.”
The video in question shows two young boys, one black and one white running towards each other, hugging, and then running off together to play.
Logan edited the video to show the two boys running away from each other with a caption that read “Terrified Todler [sic] Runs From Racist Baby,” intimating that there was racial strife between the two. It then shows the original context: that the two boys were actually friends, hugged and were running off to play with one another. The caption then reads, “America is not the problem…fake news is.”
In a post on the social media platform Parler, Logan explained the circumstances behind his ban included being asked to send personal information to a mysterious third-party company in a foreign country.
Master meme-maker Carpe Donktum has an update over at Parler about Twitter’s non-transparent actions taken against him. https://t.co/QXteAYoCJP pic.twitter.com/Dc3FkehwSr
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) June 24, 2020
“Twitter has not provided me with any avenue to get my account back, so I assume they intend this to be final and permanent,” Cook writes on his blog.
The social media giant has become increasingly aggressive in recent weeks and their censoring of President Trump’s activity on the platform and placing of “warning” labels on the President’s messages.