Twitter permanently suspended Project Veritas’s account and temporarily locked an account belonging to the group’s founder, James O’Keefe, citing multiple violations of the social media company’s policies against publishing private information.
The ban came after Project Veritas posted leaked clips from a meeting with Facebook executives in which they talked about the ways they can censor conservative content.
“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,” Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen said during the meeting, according to the footage.
In a follow-up video, a Project Veritas reporter confronts Rosen about his remarks outside his home.
Rosen’s home street number was visible in the clip, but the street name and license plates on nearby cars were not.
“When you talk about freezing comments containing hate speech, what do you mean by that?” the reporter asks. “How do you define ‘hate speech?’ Is it just speech that you hate?”
Both of these videos were flagged by Twitter, but O’Keefe said none of the material in the video had to do with Rosen’s private information.
“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,” he told The Wrap. “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.”
Twitter gave Project Veritas the chance to appeal its decision, O’Keefe said, and that’s when Twitter made the ban permanent.
“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,” O’Keefe said in a statement. Here we go again – Twitter opting to delete news and demand fealty when their decision is dared to be questioned.”
