James O'Keefe's Dildo Lube Boat Will Tweet No More

Just as Orwell warned us!

James O'Keefe, the rightwing shit-stirrer who turned dishonest editing and fake news into a business model, has been permanently suspended from Twitter. We'll give you all a moment to grieve, or more likely, to get a celebratory beverage. The move comes a couple months after Twitter permabanned O'Keefe's fake news emporium Project Veritas (Latin for makin' shit up ) for violating Twitter's "private information policy." Now that both O'Keefe and his lie factory have been banished from Twitter, where will Americans go to get their disinformation? They'll manage, we suspect.

O'Keefe quickly took to the Facebooks to insist that he was being punished for having exposed what a very evil news organization CNN is, claiming that Twitter had to stop him because his latest hidden-camera hit job "took over the internet." Yes, surely you heard all about it, didn't you? Oh, maybe you don't have a crazy rightwing uncle.

A Twitter spox said, however, that O'Keefe had been banhammered for violating the company's policies against "platform manipulation and spam."

As outlined in our policy on platform manipulation and spam, "you can't mislead others on Twitter by operating fake accounts," and "you can't artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts.'"

Twitter hasn't provided any more specific information on the activity that supposedly violated the policy, and probably won't, because Twitter is a private business that can do tyrannical things like deciding who it welcomes onto its platform.

Predictably, O'Keefe promptly announced he'll be suing Twitter for defamation, because how dare they accuse him of opening fake accounts under false identities? In a statement, O'Keefe said Twitter would rue the day it messed with him!

This is false, this is defamatory, and they will pay. Section 230 may have protected them before, but it will not protect them from me. The complaint will be filed Monday.

Section 230, the federal law that protects websites from being sued over content posted by their users, has fuck-all to do with direct statements by the company, but it makes wingnuts mad, so O'Keefe was obliged to mention it.

Still, O'Keefe probably has a very strong case, because anyone knows James O'Keefe would never stoop to using false identities. At least not anymore, now that his face is fairly well known. Otherwise, false identities are key to Project Veinysauce's modus operandi, including his latest great big CNN sting, in which a CNN technical director is seen on a hidden camera saying supposedly inflammatory stuff about the network to a woman he thought was a nurse he'd met on Tinder. Like, he even divulges shocking secrets of the TV news trade like "if it bleeds, it leads."

So poor James O'Keefe has been deplatformed, either because Twitter caught him with sockpuppet accounts, or because there's a vast social media conspiracy to silence anyone who speaks ill of CNN. Definitely one of those. Our favorite footnote to the whole dumb incident is this Fox News story headlined "Twitter accused of protecting CNN after tech giant bans James O'Keefe: 'They're all on the same team'." It's a collection of assorted rightwing figures like Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump Jr., Andy Ngo, and others sharing their opinion that O'Keefe had to be silenced because he was speaking uncomfortable truths about CNN, and isn't Twitter just the worst for silencing anyone who speaks out against the socialist media agenda?

And how did Fox News gather all this outrage about Twitter's relentless campaign of silencing a brave rightwing truth-teller?

Why, it cobbled together a collection of wingnuts' tweets, of course.

Congrats to all those brave souls for somehow escaping Twitter's relentless oppression, the end.

[ Daily Beast / The Wrap / Fox News ]

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