Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Twitter Suspends Pro-Trump Activist Group for Privacy Violations


Fri 12 Feb 2021 | 06:50 PM
Omnia Ahmed

On Thursday, Twitter permanently suspended the account of Pro-Trump activist group, Project Veritas, as the group reportedly violated the platform's policies on sharing private information.

Project Veritas, a brash team of right-wing activists which has long been one of former US President Donald Trump's most fervent backers, was banned for "repeated violations of the companies anti-doxing policies", the group's founder James O'Keefe said in a tweet.

This came a day after the group posted a video in which its journalists confronted Guy Rosen, Facebook's head of integrity and security, outside his home.

Twitter asserted that the group had been "permanently suspended for repeated violations of Twitter's private information policy", according to a statement shared to multiple US outlets .

The group had over 700,000 followers on Twitter at the time of its suspension.

Moreover; O'Keefe's account was also removed from the platform, though it returned after only a few hours.

His account was 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.

[embed]https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1360070705933672457?s=08[/embed]

O’Keefe said the organization would not be taking down the offending coverage, affirming that “It would be unconscionable for me to take down our reporting where it didn’t violate anyone’s privacy rights.”

The group has also spread unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in the United states, which were repeated by Trump last year in the wake of his election loss to Joe Biden.

Those claims ultimately led to a riot at the US capitol and Trump's permanent banning from Twitter, as well as an unprecedented second impeachment of the outgoing head of state.