Continuing with its policy of banning voices that do not conform to its leftist ideology, Twitter has permanently Project Veritas from its platform. Project Veritas is a guerilla news outlet with a conservative bent, which has exposed Twitter’s bias on several occasions. The guerilla news outlet is famous for exposing corruption within American newsrooms, including ABC News’s quashing of a Jeffrey Epstein story years before the allegations of grooming and paedophilia fully came to the limelight. The founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe, was also locked out from his Twitter account. Many observers and commentators, including Tucker Carslon of Fox News, have described these suspensions as an example of Big Tech censorship.
A Twitter spokesperson said that @Project_Veritas was “permanently suspended for repeated violations of Twitter’s private information policy.” Moreover, the Twitter account of James O’Keefe, @JamesOKeefeIII, was “temporarily locked for violating our private information policy” and that O’Keefe is “required to delete the violative Tweet to regain access to their account.”
These suspensions are the direct result of video clips that Project Veritas posted on Wednesday. A week ago, Project Veritas released video clips from an online video conference done by Facebook, in which Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, discussed the development of censorship tools in order to combat ‘hate speech’ online. Facebook Vice President of Integrity, Guy Rosen explained this in the video, “We have a system that is able to freeze commenting on threads in cases where our systems are detecting that there may be a thread that has hate speech or violence, sort of in the comments.”
On Wednesday, Project Veritas posted a video on Twitter showcasing a Project Veritas journalist confronting Guy Rosen about his remarks on the Facebook video conference. In this video, the Project Veritas journalist confronts Rosen outside his house, just as Rosen is retuning from a jog. The journalist confronts Rosen and asks, “When you talk about freezing comments containing hate speech, what do you mean by that?”
During this exchange, Rosen ignores the journalist’s questions and proceeds to enter his home unimpeded. In the video, Rosen’s house number was visible but not his street address. However, this display of house number is the reason why Twitter has censored two journalism-related accounts on their platform.
In an interview with TheWrap, James O’Keefe told the outlet, “What I’m trying to understand is, what about what we did is quote ‘posting private information’?
O’Keefe further added, “Reporters with microphones [and] cameras engage in reporting activities on the streets all the time in residential communities, so I’m trying to understand what Twitter considers violating their rules against posting private information. Does Twitter consider reporting information the public has a right to know private information? This is quite the Rubicon we’re crossing if Twitter wants to ban this particular piece of information.”
In a uniform statement to outlets such Fox News, The New York Post etc, O’Keefe says that Twitter’s claim of a violation of their private information policy was ‘false’.
“Twitter invited Project Veritas to, and we did, appeal that decision with Twitter. In an apparent act of retaliation for daring to question their authority, Twitter responded to our appeal by suspending our account, continuing to tell us that Project Veritas could delete the tweet and have our account reinstated.”
James O’Keefe added, “This is nothing new from Twitter – just last fall Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted in Congress his company’s decision to block the New York Post was erroneous while still demanding the Post kneel before them by deleting the tweet.” This is a callback to when the supposed paragon of free speech virtue, Twitter, censored a Hunter Biden corruption story by The New York Post, by locking The New York Post’s twitter account. The pretext given for this censorship was also in the name of protecting private information.
“Here we go again – Twitter opting to delete news and demand fealty when their decision is dared to be questioned. “ O’Keefe said.
O’Keefe later announced his come back to Twitter after deciding to delete the tweets which allegedly violated Twitter’s private information policy in order to reinstate his account
Reaction from Tucker Carlson
The reaction to this incident of Big Tech censorship has been apoplectic in American conservative circles. Tucker Carlson, one of the highest rated T.V. news hosts in America took note of this story. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson told his audience that the Democratic Party and Big Tech corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter are colluding to censor free speech and the free internet.
Tucker notes, “Your right to say and think what you want, to read and watch what you want, that threatens them above all. Why? Because if you have access to information, you can form your own judgments. A free Internet is their enemy. The moment they took power, Democrats began a kind of Counter-Reformation against the free Internet. They started the most sweeping mass censorship campaign in the history of this country.”
Then Tucker Carlson gives reference of LifeSiteNews, a pro-life, anti-abortion website taken off YouTube, owned by Google. “Why did they do that?” asks Carlson rhetorically. “Simple: Google supports abortion, like a lot of big corporations do. Children distract the labor force. If you’re raising your family, you are not serving shareholders. Google doesn’t want a debate on the subject, so they just shut the debate down. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers to LifeSiteNews will no longer be watching videos that question abortion, because they’re not allowed to.” added Carlson attempting to quantify the enormous ways in which Big Tech censorship silences and poisons political discourse.
On the subject of Project Veritas’s censorship, Tucker Carlson said, “There was no justifiable reason to do this, but no one in the media asked questions about it or appear to consider it a problem.” Tucker criticizes Poltico’s reporting on this issue, calling out the reporter by name. Tucker claims the reason why Project Veritas faced censorship from Twitter was because it criticized the ‘people in charge’.
Tucker claims that the goal of Big Tech companies engaging in censorship and the mainstream press cheering them on, is to impose a monoculture on society with uniformity of thought and no dissent. “They just accept whatever the Central Committee decides is the slogan of the day, and anyone who mocks or disagrees with those slogans is silenced. In the name of diversity, we must have uniformity. We’ll have all the impediments to achieving this goal of uniformity, including centuries of tradition, the First Amendment to the Constitution, and the fact this was a free country.”
Established in 2011, Project Veritas is a non-profit journalism enterprise. Project Veritas describes itself as investigators of corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions. Project Veritas has had varying success over the years. One of the most successful operations conducted by Project Veritas was the video leak of ABC News anchor Amy Robach telling people in the studio, but off-camera, that her bosses at ABC News spiked her expose of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The Robach video was viewed and shared by tens of millions of people and was covered in mainstream press internationally.
Project Veritas’s reporting has exposed various scandals and conspiracies, from Antifa’s criminal conspiracies which lead to criminal arrests to revealing corrupt bias in Big Tech companies. There can be no doubt that first and foremost, Project Veritas is a journalism enterprise. It utilizes undercover audio/video recordings, in order to expose powerful institutions. The Big Tech censorship of Project Veritas by Twitter reveals that Twitter is not a neutral observer which prioritizes free speech and letting the tweets ‘flow’
Let us recall that Twitter refused to block accounts which were classified by Indian security agencies as inciting violence during the Farmers Protest, citing the freedom of speech and the free flow of information. That’s why it is important to take note of Big Tech censorship, especially by Twitter, which is clearly has a double standard based on political beliefs. Twitter will not ban accounts promoting violence as classified by the Indian government, but will permanently suspend accounts of journalism groups like Project Veritas.
Project Veritas had leaked Twitter CEO’s video
Last month, Project Veritas had released a video, where Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was heard saying that the company will intensify censorship on its platform following the ban on Donald Trump. In the secret recording, which was reportedly leaked by one employee of Twitter, Jack Dorsey could be seen discussing the platform’s long term policy in terms of political censorship. He had said to his employees, “The focus is certainly on this account (Donald Trump), and how it ties to real-world violence, but also we need to think much longer-term around how these dynamics play out over time. I don’t believe this is going away any time soon.”
The Twitter CEO had divulged that the attempt to silence and ban conservative opinion-makers is not just limited to Donald Trump. He pointed out that the censorship will continue, well past the inauguration of president-elect Joe Biden on January 20. He had said, “we know we are focused on one account right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account, and it’s going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, the next few weeks, going on beyond inauguration. We have to expect that. We have to be ready for that.”
Jack Dorsey also admitted that the micro-blogging platform intended to banning more conservative handles. He added, “The moves that we’re making today, around, you know, QAnon, for instance, is one such example of a much broader approach that we should be looking at and going deeper on.
