Twitter Deplatforms Project Veritas

One of the biggest sources of original alternative content, Project Veritas, is now banned from one of the biggest platforms to reach millions of Americans, Twitter.

Without being terribly specific as to what the “repeated violations” were of the company rules, Twitter deplatformed Veritas on February 11.

The proximate cause of banishment was a brief video posted by Veritas where one of their journalists, 60 Minutes style, accosts an employee of Facebook who is returning home from a jog. This Facebook executive, Guy Rosen, had previously been featured in a Veritas video, leaked to Veritas by a Facebook whistleblower, where he claims the platform is freezing comments whenever automated systems detect “there may be a thread that has hate speech or violence.”

It’s interesting that Project Veritas, at least so far, survives on Facebook, despite Facebook, and not Twitter, being the target of many recent controversial videos from Veritas. But that may change. On February 17, in yet another leaked video featuring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, he is exposed expressing concern for the COVID-19 vaccines, worrying they may alter human DNA and wondering about the possible long-term side effects.

Facebook bans all posts that make similar claims about the COVID-19 vaccines, making this video somewhat embarrassing for the company.

Because there are so many, it is difficult to keep track even of these major incidents of censorship. One of the biggest reasons for bans is so-called “hate speech.” But “hate speech” is a nebulous term. As the Veritas journalist put it to Facebook’s Guy Rosen, “do you ban hate speech, or speech you hate?”

Banning Veritas from a major social media platform is not a trivial incident of censorship – notwithstanding that no exercise of censorship is trivial. With their videos, Veritas provides essential balance. When nobody else was there to do it, Project Veritas has done landmark investigations. For example, they exposed the corruption at ACORN, seriously disrupting its activities.

A mainstay of the mainstream media that gets more biased very year, 60 Minutes, engages in reporting that is every bit as aggressive as Veritas, but runs virtually zero risk of being deplatformed from the major social media platforms. Why is this? 60 Minutes routinely presents investigations that are supposedly objective, but to informed observers are transparently biased. Their selectivity in pursuit of their narrative easily rivals, if not surpasses, anything Veritas has ever done.

Once again, the double standard applies.

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