Twitter temporarily suspended Project Veritas’s account Wednesday after the group published internal documents from Pinterest and alleged they show the company suppressing a pro-life organization.
Project Veritas shared documents Tuesday on Twitter showing that Pinterest monitored Live Action and alleged it was an attempt to censor the pro-life group. Veritas reported that a whistleblower said a Pinterest staffer allegedly added LiveAction.org to a Pinterest “pornography block list.” LiveAction received an email Tuesday morning announcing that the group had been banned.
Twitter blocked Veritas from tweeting, retweeting and using other features for posting some of the documents. A Twitter employee with knowledge of the situation told The Daily Caller News Foundation the account violated policies preventing users from publishing “other people’s private information.” (RELATED: Pinterest Labels Live Action Content As Pornography — Then Bans The Pro-Life Group From Pinterest)
Breaking News: Twitter has decided that investigative journalism is in violation of their terms of service – @Project_Veritas has been temporarily suspended from posting for tweeting internal communications from @Pinterest which show them calling @benshapiro a “white supremacist” pic.twitter.com/eJNDWEfanf
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) June 12, 2019
“Project Veritas will continue publishing information of national public interest. Twitter should not make news decisions on America’s behalf,” Veritas spokesman Marco Bruno said in a statement to TheDCNF.
He also said the tweet, which Veritas has since removed, contained a reference to a Pinterest employee calling conservative pundit Ben Shapiro a “white supremacist.” The Pinterest insider told Veritas that employees inside Pinterest were suppressing content mentioning Shapiro.
Pinterest, for its part, told TheDCNF on Tuesday that labeling Live Action content as porn was an accident.
“LiveAction.org was actioned for misinformation related to conspiracies and anti-vaccination advice, and not porn,” Pinterest told TheDCNF. “Sometimes our internal tools have legacy names for the technology that enforces some of our policies. This technology was named years ago to combat porn, and has since expanded to a variety of content despite retaining its original internal name. We are updating our internal labeling to make this clear.”
This is not the first time a pro-life group has seen its content throttled. Instagram said in May it inadvertently and incorrectly blocked pro-life group Let Them Live from accessing a feature on the platform people often use to make content go viral.
Let Them Live’s Instagram posts stopped appearing on numerous hashtags starting April 18, the group said in a May 15 press statement posted to its Instagram page. The group, which has 15,000 Instagram followers, brought its case directly to the company April 25 as the group’s engagement rate sagged.
Pinterest did not immediately respond to additional questions from TheDCNF on Wednesday.
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