He was banned from social media. So how come chef Pete Evans is back?

Four years after being banned from Facebook and Instagram for deliberately spreading misinformation, wellness activist Pete Evans is once again using the platforms to promote his businesses, recipes and sometimes-controversial views on health and medicine.

The former celebrity chef and My Kitchen Rules host has rekindled his social media profile as part of a broader campaign of re-emergence into public life that has seemingly benefited from the tailwind of Donald Trump’s re-election as US president, and especially his appointment of vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr as his secretary of health and human services.

Wellness advocate Pete Evans shared this image on social media on the day Donald Trump was re-elected.Credit: Instagram

“What a time to be ALIVE,” Evans posted on Instagram a week ago alongside a picture of Kennedy, and the caption “CONFIRMED! US Secretary of HHS”.

That post has been liked more than 4700 times on his Instagram account, which has just under 45,000 followers. When de-platformed in February 2021, he had hundreds of thousands of followers.

Earlier, in December 2020, Evans was removed from Facebook, where he had more than 1.4 million followers, for spreading misinformation about COVID.

Though his views on so-called big pharma put him at odds with the mainstream medical establishment at the height of COVID, it was a cartoon he shared in November 2020 that prompted his rapid fall from grace.

The image of a butterfly, with its wings bearing the sonnenrad (black sun) symbol beloved of neo-Nazis, signalled Evans’ move in the public consciousness from wellness guru to fraterniser of the far right.

Pan MacMillan, which had published 19 books by Evans, was the first to react, announcing it was severing its relationship with him. Network Ten followed soon after, dumping him from its line-up for I’m a Celebrity … Get Me out of Here! Sponsors and retailers soon followed.

Despite the bans, Evans maintained a social media presence under pages associated with his businesses Paleo Way and Evolve Network.

According to a report on Crikey this week, while those pages largely restricted themselves to recipe content, Evans rebranded them in 2023 under his former social media identity, Chef Pete Evans, and began posting some fringe content alongside the recipes.

That appears to have been a breach of Meta’s own policies on “recidivism”.

“We’ve long prohibited people from creating new Pages, groups, events, or accounts that look similar to those we’ve previously removed for violating our Community Standards,” Meta’s guidelines, published in 2019, state. “However, we’ve seen people working to get around our enforcement by using existing Pages that they already manage for the same purpose as the Page we removed for violating our standards.”

Meta claims that to ensure repeat offenders do not re-emerge by stealth, “we’ll look at a broad set of information, including whether the Page has the same people administering it, or has a similar name, to one we’re removing”.

However, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media behemoth announced last month that it was changing its position on moderation and the spread of misinformation because it had become “too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement”.

The second coming of Evans, though, was well under way before then.

Last November, he teamed with anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr to release a cookbook for children in the US. Healthy Food, Healthy Kids, with 120 paleo- and keto-friendly recipes, is published by Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defence, and is available via online retailers.

Doubts about the efficacy of some COVID vaccines have gained ground in recent times, including among some mainstream medical researchers. Coupled with the election of Trump, this has helped pave the way for the second coming of Pete Evans.

In December, Lucy Zelic interviewed him on the Afternoons show on 2GB, where she was filling in for Michael McLaren, and introduced him as “an extraordinary man” who “bravely stood up and tried to challenge [the] narrative” about COVID.

Dismissing the Nazi cartoon as “an innocent meme”, Zelic said the way Evans had been treated by the media, politicians, his publishers and the Therapeutic Goods Administration (which had fined him in early 2020 for promoting a $15,000 “biocharger” as an effective treatment for coronavirus, without any evidence to support the claim) was “disgraceful”.

Lucy Zelic offered a fawning introduction when she interviewed Evans in December.Credit: SBS

Zelic wasn’t the first broadcaster to lend her support to Evans’ bid for a comeback either.

In July 2023, Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson gave him almost half an hour to state his case to be “uncancelled”. Following a series of soft questions that presupposed his innocence on all charges, and a listener vote that went 80 per cent in his favour, the pair concluded he should be uncancelled.

As far as Meta’s platforms are concerned, at least, it appears he has been.

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