Social media company Parler has slammed Twitter’s decision to suspend Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, saying that the move amounts to “political censorship” and “election interference.”
Twitter suspended O’Keefe’s account last month shortly after Project Veritas released undercover footage showing Bernie Sanders staffers praising Stalin’s gulags and promising that “cities will burn” if President Donald Trump is re-elected.
Parler CEO John Matze said in a statement to Breitbart News that Twitter’s decision represents an attack on investigative journalism.
“Investigative journalism requires information to be released that would not normally make it to the public eye. This is a form of transparency. By going out of your way to stonewall transparency you are killing real journalism and when you only do it to protect politicians with your favored ideology, it looks biased and it is political censorship. This is election interference,” he said.
“Additionally I would like to stress that people need to make a stand against social publications and join Parler because this election interference by Twitter is going to get much worse before it gets better and Parler is the only answer.”
Parler launched in 2018 as a competitor to Twitter and has attracted conservatives concerned about censorship from Silicon Valley giants.
Twitter has claimed that it locked O’Keefe’s account because of “privacy violations” after O’Keefe posted a publicly available FEC paystub of the Sanders staffer who praised violence and gulags.
O’Keefe told Breitbart News earlier this month that “the information we published was a screenshot 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.”
Parler previously criticized Twitter’s “cowardice” in its blacklisting of British political commentator Katie Hopkins.
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