Instagram Shadow Bans Spragga Benz, Censors Buju Banton For Anti-Vaxxer Posts
Spragga Benz and Buju Banton, two of Dancehall’s staunchest critics of Jamaica’s containment measures and global vaccination efforts, have fallen under Instagram’s censorship radar.
On Monday, Spragga Benz pointed out that he had been shadow-banned or secretly censored by Instagram, which had made his page invisible to non-followers and rendering him untaggable by other pages. Spragga, who has 223,000 followers, shared a screenshot of one follower attempting in vain, to tag him during Buju Banton’s ‘In Di Pen’ on Independence Day Live feed as evidence that the social media platform was on his case.
“A fan wrote: ‘I tried to mention you under Buju Banton’s live and they would not allow it. A few others have tried to but they were only able to mention your clothing line. But thank you so much for using your platform to try bring in some of the lost sheep. Respect from the Bahamas,” Spragga wrote.
“@instagram yu cant stop Jah mission,” he later added under the same post.
Hours later, on Tuesday morning, one of Buju Banton’s post bearing the logos of the World Health Organisation, the Johns Hopkins University and the World Economic Forum was flagged as false by Instagram.
The post which the Til Shiloh artist had captioned ““IN PLANE SIGHT”, was ridiculed by some of his 1.3 million followers, but endorsed by Spragga who said: “Omega at the end huh.. dem a play god games but dem anuh god #AlphaAndOmega”.
After getting wind that the post was flagged as false, Buju again posted sarcastically: “Why wouldn’t it be fake johns Hopkins uni info is fake? Or we catching up too quick?”
He was supported by many of his fans who hailed him for “revealing the truth” to the people, but there were those who jeered the Penthouse label superstar and accused him of being a silly, gullible man.
“😂😂 this is literally nothing but a table and logos that ANYBODY can make in Microsoft word like??? 😭😭😂😂😂😂😂😭😭😭😭,” an amused tatipalooza wrote.
“Dude can’t even spell plain right and people gonna listen to him,” leroythemasochist jeered.
Buju’s post appears to be an edited version of the list of COVID-19 variants announced by the World Health Organisation, using a new naming system via the Greek alphabet, to make it easier for non-scientists to keep track of them.
On June 1, National Geographic in an article titled How virus variants get their confusing names—and why that’s changing sought to explain why the World Health Organization had “assigned letters of the Greek alphabet to each of the major variants that are driving surges around the world”.
According to the National Geographic, the variant first documented in the United Kingdom, which was named “B.1.1.7” by scientists, would “now also be known simply as Alpha, while the variant that Abdool Karim named in South Africa will be called Beta and so on”.
In March this year, Spragga had claimed that “bigger heads” were plotting against himself and Buju Banton for their stances against vaccination, after Instagram began flagging his posts for ‘promoting falsehoods’.
Spragga and Buju have been at the forefront of those burning “fire” on the Government of Jamaica’s attempts to inoculate at least 60 percent of the island’s population against COVID-19. The two have consistently been making posts arguing that the pandemic was planned to implement, among other things, a “New World Order”.
On March 10, Spragga and several his IG followers got into an argument after he complained that one of his anti-vaccination posts was flagged as having “partly false information”, noting that “Freedom of speech is my right so if it is not recognized on this medium well… do what you have to”.
At the time, the Count Tree artist was taken to task by the followers who told him to, among other things, refrain from promoting conspiracies. Others told him that while he was entitled to freedom of speech, Instagram has a right to point out that his post had untruths and he should either deal with it or delete his account.