Shield & Friends
With a tweet of four letters, X owner Elon Musk has made himself heard in the debate about the conviction of Dries Van Langenhove. When posting a message about the statement, Musk said “Whoa”, which started a conversation with Van Langenhove.
Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk retweeted a message from Dutch Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a conservative influencer and former politician at Forum for Democracy. In her tweet she says that Van Langenhove was convicted because racist memes were shared in a private chat group of which he was a member, without elaborating on his role and the further motivation for the conviction.
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In a response to a message from Van Langenhove about the verdict, Musk tries to summarize the situation. “Someone sent a meme in a chat group, and you received a prison sentence?” he asks Van Langenhove. He answers affirmatively. He does say that he was convicted because he did not do enough to stop others.
“Most important nationalist activist”
Van Langenhove repeats to Musk that he himself did not participate in the discussion with “edgy memes”. “Now, seven years later, I am the most important nationalist activist in Belgium and the Netherlands, and I am linked to the party that will win the coming elections in Belgium.” That is why the “regime” wants to deal with him, he tells Musk. Van Langenhove even adjusted his profile description on
But the defense that it was only about “jokes” among friends in a private chat group was undermined by the Ghent court in its judgment: “Through racist and negationist ‘humor’, the members were deliberately convinced of their own superiority.”
The verdict also shows that the judge did not sentence Van Langenhove solely on the basis of the memes. “The file shows that he wanted to undermine democratic society and replace it with his social model of white supremacy. All this points to a particularly dangerous attitude,” it reads.
As “initiator, founder and leader” of Schild & Friends, “he has drawn the other defendants into his racist, hateful, Nazi and negationist discourse,” the judge writes. In this way, Van Langenhove “encouraged physical and psychological violence”.
‘Shadowban’
Van Langenhove uses the conversation with Musk to point out that he believes he is being disadvantaged by X’s algorithm. Van Langenhove speaks of a “shadow ban”. He claims he has been banned from search results and his posts are difficult to view, “which has been weighing on my reach for years.”
