Twitter users noticed on Thursday that the company appears to have suspended the far-right activist group Project Veritas. The group, which was founded in 2010 by James O’Keefe, is known to release deceptively edited videos to push far right rhetoric on social media. Most notably were videos from the early 2000’s that attempted to wrap Planned Parenthood in controversy by illegally recording phone calls and private visits within Los Angeles clinics.
More recently, Project Veritas pushed several videos that contributed to the voter fraud conspiracy theory in the 2020 Presidential Election. One video alleged that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was behind ballot harvesting in Minnesota, but the subject of the video later revealed that he was offered a bribe to say that he was illegally harvesting ballots. The subject also noted that Project Veritas edited two separate videos together to make it look like he was boasting on social media about illegally harvesting ballots on behalf of Omar.
Another video released after the 2020 election claimed that a Pennsylvania postal worker said that the post office had mistakenly postmarked ballots on the wrong date, which would have impacted the election. It was later revealed that the postal worker recanted the allegations and said that the statement was not true.
Project Veritas was from Twitter after its account violated Twitter’s private information policy, according to a Twitter spokesperson to Grit Daily. The Project Veritas founder, James O’Keefe, was also locked out of his account on Thursday after violating the same policy. Project Veritas posted a video to its Twitter account on Wednesday that showed journalist Christian Hartsock asking Guy Rosen, the Facebook VP, outside of his home about a Facebook policy on hate speech. In the video Rosen’s home address is visible, though there is no street name.
It’s unclear how long O’Keefe will be locked from being able to access his Twitter account, or if the suspension of Project Veritas’ account is permanent.
