James O’Keefe of Project Veritas was permanently suspended from Twitter on April 15 for what the platform labeled “manipulation and spam.”
Twitter claims that O’Keefe was banned for running multiple fake accounts. O’Keefe argues that he was banned instead after he released undercover video depicting a CNN staffer admitting to a Project Veritas journalist how the network was biased against conservatives and pushed leftist narratives.
In one section of the video, the CNN staffer says, “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.”
As has been made patently clear by its past actions, Twitter is run by leftists who have no love for traditional and conservative values, and it will censor content it disagrees with. Twitter will ban conservatives on the flimsiest of excuses and often ignores similar offenses committed by its own political allies.
One need look no further than the trials and tribulations of O’Keefe to prove this point. O’Keefe and Project Veritas have been at the center of numerous suspensions and censorship efforts before his eventual permanent ban.
For example, Project Veritas posted a clip of its journalists approaching a Facebook executive outside of his home. Twitter promptly removed the video over anti-doxing concerns.
Compare that with a tweet published by CNN. A reporter approaches a Trump-supporting woman he believed was duped by the Russians. In addition to revealing her name and general location, CNN shot video footage of her home, revealing her house number.
The tweet is still up, and CNN faced no repercussions for it.
What makes the double standard displayed by Twitter worse is that it’s the rule on the internet, not the exception. Conservatives have become acutely aware that they are no longer welcome on an increasing number of platforms.
In another revelation from Project Veritas, it was shown that the popular image-sharing site Pinterest had secretly blacklisted links from Live Action, a prominent pro-life organization.
When a whistleblower at Pinterest revealed that the site was blocking content from Live Action, he was fired, and the informal blacklist became a formal ban for “harmful misinformation.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also saw firsthand how conservatives and liberals play by different rules online. A roundtable discussion on COVID-19 featuring the Republican governor and doctors from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford was removed from YouTube for “COVID misinformation.” Specifically, YouTube cited the experts’ disagreement that children need to wear masks.
It’s even gotten to the point where conservatives are unable to spend their own money online if the payment processor disagrees with their values.
“Super-Straight,” an internet community critical of transgenderism, had crowdfunded $7,000 in donations to a Vancouver, British Columbia, based women’s rape crisis center before GoFundMe took its page down.
So, what to do? When one political and moral philosophy becomes so dominant online that it can effectively exterminate all dissent, the solution many cite is to leave and create conservative-only spaces.
But that philosophy is doomed to fail because it doesn’t attack the root of the problem. The current cultural climate is heavily slanted in favor of the left, and therefore, the internet is quickly becoming a progressive bubble.
By ceding control of the web to the left, the long-term existence of conservative and independent thought is placed in jeopardy. That would be absolutely devastating for the country.
That being the case, the solution isn’t to create another bubble; it’s to pop the current one. Conservatives shouldn’t be running away. They should stand up and be loudly and openly demanding a seat at the table.
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