Twitter locked the account of investigative journalist James O’Keefe last month after he and Project Veritas released undercover footage showing Bernie Sanders staffers praising Stalin’s gulags and promising that “cities will burn” if Donald Trump is re-elected. According to Project Veritas, “Twitter’s end game is likely similar to that of their Silicon Valley friend Google; in the words of Google’s Head of Innovation Jen Gennai ‘Prevent the next Trump situation.’”
Twitter claims it locked O’Keefe’s account because of “privacy violations,” after O’Keefe posted a publicly available FEC paystub of one of the Sanders’ staffers who praised violence and gulags.
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe blasted Twitter for suggesting his tweet violated anyone’s privacy.
“At Project Veritas we respect the rights of privacy,” said O’Keefe in a statement to Breitbart News. “Professional codes of ethics instruct journalists to minimize harm to the public, requiring an “overriding” public interest to invade someone’s privacy.”
“In the case of our recent Twitter suspension, Twitter said we had violated their rules for ‘posting private information.’ But the information we published was a screen shot from a U.S Government website, certainly not private. But even if it was private, the information did meet the threshold of ‘overriding’ public interest.”
Bernie 2020 Staffer Kyle Jurek was recorded by Project Veritas saying things such as:
“Fucking cities will burn if Trump is re-elected.”
“There’s a reason Joseph Stalin had Gulags, right? And actually, Gulags are a lot better than what the CIA has told us they were…”
“The cops are gonna be the ones that are getting f*cking beaten in Milwaukee. They’re gonna call up the National Guard for that sh*t. I promise you that.”
“I’m ready to throw down now. I don’t want to wait and have to wait for fucking DNC … The billionaire class. The fucking media, pundits. Walk into that MSNBC studios, drag those motherfuckers out by their hair and light them on fire in the streets.”
“The only thing that fascists understand is violence. So, the only way you can confront them is with violence.”
“The information posted was not private; it is publicly available and found easily on the FEC website (found here),” said a spokesman for Project Veritas.
“In correcting the false reporting of Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel who had claimed that subjects featured in our recent #Expose2020 series were Bernie ‘volunteers,’ we replied to him by posting the FEC paystub of Kyle Jurek. Within minutes Weigel was forced to retract his false tweet.”
“Twitter suspended the account for what one can only assume are political reasons, they are worried about the effectiveness of our mission here at Project Veritas,” continued the spokesman. “Even their new policies seem to reflect an attack on what we do, and open up the possibility of permanent suspension.”
“Twitter would never do this to the NYT, WaPO or CNN. In fact CNN regularly targets people at their homes.”
“Twitter’s end game is likely similar to that of their Silicon Valley friend Google; in the words of Google’s Head of Innovation Jen Gennai ‘Prevent the next Trump situation.’”
“Social media censorship is absolutely getting worse by the day and it will seemingly only continue on these major platforms until real replacements begin to take significant market share.”
This is not the first time Twitter has targeted Project Veritas in the wake of its investigative reporting. The organization’s account was briefly suspended last year after its publication of internal documents from the imagesharing website Pinterest that revealed a blacklist against conservative content. Twitter has also blocked Project Veritas from running ads aimed at recruiting new journalists.
In a comment to Breitbart News, Twitter confirmed that they temporarily locked O’Keefe’s account for “violating our private information policy.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.