On Thursday, Twitter permanently banned conservative journalist and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe after he posted undercover videos exposing CNN’s overt bias to the public. Claiming his posts were “violating the Twitter Rules on platform manipulation and spam,” O’Keefe has now threatened to sue the platform.
“As outlined in our policy on platform manipulation and spam, ‘You can’t mislead others on Twitter by operating fake accounts,’ and ‘you can’t artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts,’” Twitter explained.
However, Twitter has no evidence O’Keefe operates fake accounts, prompting O’Keefe to announce his intent to sue the platform for defamation.
“I am suing Twitter for defamation because they said, I, James O’Keefe, ‘operated fake accounts.’ This is false, this is defamatory, and they will pay,” O’Keefe said. “Section 230 may have protected them before, but it will not protect them from me. The complaint will be filed Monday.”
The videos, entirely unedited nor unaltered, depicted CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester boasting about CNN’s role in kicking out former President Donald Trump from the White House, explaining how CNN used “propaganda” to fight against Trump.
Chester bragged, “Look what we did, we [CNN] got Trump out. I am 100% going to say it, and I 100% believe that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out…I came to CNN because I wanted to be a part of that.”
“It’s going to be our [CNN’s] focus. Like our focus was to get Trump out of office, right? Without saying it, that’s what it was, right? So, our next thing is going to be climate change awareness.”
“[Trump’s] hand was shaking or whatever, I think. We brought in so many medical people to tell a story that was all speculation — that he was neurologically damaged, and he was losing it,” Chester added. “He’s unfit to — you know, whatever. We were creating a story there that we didn’t know anything about. That’s what — I think that’s propaganda.”
Chester also revealed CNN was “trying to help BLM” and described how CNN relied on the race of individuals involved in crimes to determine how much coverage incidents received on the channel.
This latest suspension marks the second instance of Twitter targeting O’Keefe as he, along with the main Project Veritas account, was suspended two months ago for violating the social network’s private information policy but was later reinstated. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to Forbes that this suspension would be permanent.
