Ralf Little said that he was booted out of his Twitter account after he mocked the Tories for their fact-checking rebrand.
Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) caused outrage for rebranding their account factcheckUK during the first election debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson.
Twitter has since threatened to ban them from the platform should they do so again.
Soon after their rebrand, dozens of high-profile Twitter accounts promptly copied the move to pillory the Tories, one of them being Royle Family actor Ralf Little. He altered his name to ‘Conservative Press Orifice’ and the description to ‘Not a fact-checker or the Conservative Press Office’.
Ralf sent a message that he’d been logged out of his Twitter account without explanation and assumed he’d been suspended, which was fine but only if the CCHQPress account is suspended for the same thing and he asked for people to press the issue with Twitter in his absence. The account continues to be visible but no Tweets have been posted.
In the meantime, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab stated the Conservatives won’t make any apology for having an instant rebuttal of the garbage and lies circulated by opposition parties, he also didn’t rule out the party doing it again.
And speaking about the Tories changing their Twitter to factcheckUK during the leader’s debate, Dominic Raab stated that they’ll always abide by the rules with these things and that if there’s information that comes out, look at it extremely thoroughly.
He further added that he’s not in charge of social media but that he believed the account was very clearly linked to the CCHQ, it was on the face of it but that they were refuting the stupidity that regularly gets put about the Conservative position so that voters and the audiences know the facts.
The @CCHQpress account is verified by Twitter, displaying a blue tick which is designed to indicate that a user is authenticated and in acknowledgement, Twitter has warned that rules are in place on the platform which prevents behaviour that deceives the public.
Twitter said that it’s committed to promoting wholesome debate during the UK General Election and that they have global rules in place to prevent behaviour that can deceive people, including those with confirmed accounts and that any further endeavours to deceive people by editing verified profile information, in a manner seen during the UK election debate will result in certain corrective action.
And Twitter has been bolstering its efforts to prevent misleading information during the election campaign after launching a new tool to allow people to report intentionally misleading details about the voting process.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with fact-checking and Ralf Little presumably wasn’t locked out of Twitter for what he said, it was probably the phrasing of his username and Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are not the purveyors of restraint, they’re the purveyors of a snowflake mentality.
