Twitter has permanently suspended the account of conservative activist group Project Veritas, after the organization released a video of a reporter questioning a Facebook executive outside their home, the New York Times reports. The account of Project Veritas’s founder, James O’Keefe, was also temporarily locked.
In a statement given to the NYT, Twitter said the @Project_Veritas account was suspended for “repeated violations of Twitter’s private information policy.”
In a statement published by Policito, O’Keefe said the offending video included footage of a reporter questioning Facebook vice president Guy Ronsen, but denied that Project Veritas had published his private information. The NYT notes that this questioning took place outside the executive’s home. O’Keefe said the organization would not be taking down the offending coverage. “It would be unconscionable for me to take down our reporting where it didn’t violate anyone’s privacy rights,” he told the NYT.
After temporarily locking his account, Twitter said O’Keefe would need to delete a post that was in violation of its rules before he could tweet again. As of this writing, O’Keefe’s account is active once again, with two tweets labelled as unavailable on its feed. “I’M BACK,” reads its pinned post, accompanied by a video outlining the group’s dispute with Twitter.
Prior to its suspension, Project Veritas’s Twitter account was prominent on the platform, and counted Donald Trump’s adult sons as followers. But others have questioned its tactics and the accuracy of its reporting. One of its videos about allegations of voter fraud was called “a domestic, coordinated elite disinformation campaign” by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington, Politico notes. Other examples of its videos include one which claimed to show evidence of bias against then-President Trump at Google, as well as another that claimed to show bias against conservatives at Facebook.
This article is auto-generated by Algorithm Source: www.theverge.com
