Twitter’s Mass Censorship Plans Exposed by Project Veritas

Yesterday, a video was released by Project Veritas under the hashtag #ExposeTwitter. In it, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey addresses the recent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account and outlines his idea of the continuation of Twitter’s censorship campaign.

Project Veritas has not released the full, unedited video of the call in which Dorsey makes his statements. Instead, only selected segments are available - presumably the most damning in the eyes of Project Veritas.

In the video, Jack Dorsey says:

‘We intend to do the full retro, as I said in my note. It is going to take some time.’

This indicates that Twitter might plan to carry out a retroactive scan of users’ content to search for potentially problematic statements. To confirm this, a further explanation would need to be provided by Dorsey in the video which is cut shortly after. Dorsey does say that the process ‘is going to take some time’, hinting at censorship efforts on a massive scale.

In the following statement, Twitter’s CEO goes on to elaborate on his previous point:

‘We are focused on one account right now, but this is gonna be much bigger and is going to go on for much longer than just this day.’

Here, Dorsey refers to the banning of Trump last week in response to the takeover of the US Capitol on January 6th.

He further expresses his worry about the state of the political discourse in the US:

‘I don’t believe this is going away anytime soon,’

From the context in the video, it seems that Dorsey is referring to Trump’s movement and his supporters. Along with many others, he thinks, arguably with good reason, that Trump is (or was) a manifestation of wider tendencies in the American public that are independent of him. This means that were Trump to withdraw from public life altogether, the movement that gathered around him will find its expression and rallying point elsewhere.

Finally, Dorsey points to the removal of QAnon conspiracy content from Twitter as a good example of how censorship campaigns should be conducted more widely.

‘The moves that we’re making today around QAnon, for instance, is one such example of a much broader approach that we should be looking at and going deeper on. So, the team has a lot of work and a lot of focus on this particular issue. But we also need to give them the space and the support to focus on the much bigger picture,’

In August 2018, Alex Jones was arguably the first prominent public personality to be banned from social media in a coordinated way. As the public backlash stirred up by his deplatforming was limited, large social media platforms have utilized this strategy ever more for the removal of politically controversial figures. This has culminated in the manner in which Donald Trump was eventually suspended from virtually all large social media at the beginning of January 2021.

Jack Dorsey’s statements presenting the removal of QAnon content as the blueprint for what should be happening in the ‘much bigger picture’ hint at a similar strategy being used. The backlash to the efforts to marginalize QAnon accounts is perhaps even more limited than the backlash to the deplatforming of Alex Jones. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, if more, ever less-fringe communities and topics of discussion start being removed from Silicon Valley social networks in the near future.

In response to Project Veritas’ founder James O’Keefe’s post including the newly-released video, Twitter’s head of global communications Brandon Borrman responded mockingly:

While Borrman points to Dorsey’s comments on the rationale for the suspension of Donald Trump, nowhere in his statement does Dorsey say anything about the wider censorship campaigns or his plans for the future content curation efforts on Twitter.

Addressing the deplatforming of Trump, Dorsey had said:

‘I believe this was the right decision for Twitter. We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.’

In Project Veritas’ video, the Twitter CEO expresses his regrets that ‘the US is extremely divided’, likely referring to an intensification of public debate about politics and culture in general. At the same time, in another part of his comments on the Trump ban, he says:

‘Having to take these actions fragment[s] the public conversation. They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption, and learning.’

Nevertheless, as his remarks seen in Project Veritas’ video expressed in private show, his intention is to further intensify the censorship efforts, which, in his own words, will serve to ‘further divide us’.

Project Veritas’ video was covered by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who shared his main takeaway from the leaked clips: ‘This is about controlling you and the country you thought was yours,’ not about Trump or the Capitol protest.

Featured on Fox News’ Hannity, Project Veritas’ O’Keefe addressed the increasing number of whistleblowers within major tech companies coming forward with revelations about their bosses’ and colleagues’ intentions and actions: ‘The people that work in these companies’ are having a ‘crisis of conscience’. ‘So many are upset and coming forward now.’

Earlier this week, Project Veritas published a video exposing Principal Counsel at PBS Michael Beller calling for children of Trump supporters to be put in re-education camps. Beller later resigned from his position. In response, PBS published a statement on Twitter disavowing him and his ‘hateful rhetoric’, stressing that they ‘strongly condemn violence’. The story has been more extensively covered on the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters.