I believe it was meant ironically. Similar to the joke "I double rot13 all my emails, but I'm probably just being paranoid." (If you're not familiar with rot13, running it twice results in the original plaintext.)
It's a joke, but at the same time, I doubt the pattern-recognition bots correct for it, so it would likely have some effect security-wise, to the same extent you get by spelling 'shit' as 'sh|t'.