James O'Keefe Sues Twitter For Defamation... For Shutting Down His Account
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210425/18082546683/james-okeefe-sues-twitter-defamation-shutting-down-his-account.shtml
You may have heard recently that James O'Keefe, the guy behind "Project Veritas" -- a propaganda outlet whose brand of highly edited, surreptitiously recorded videos are often followed by actual media having to come in and debunk the misleading bits -- had his Twitter account shut down recently. He immediately threatened to sue Twitter, and last week he actually did so.
The crux of the lawsuit is that because a reporter claimed that Twitter told him O'Keefe's account was banned for "operating fake accounts," that's defamation. The lawsuit notes that back in February, Twitter also banned the Project Veritas account. In that case, it was because one of Project Veritas' videos allegedly revealed "private information" which violated its rules. In that case, the private information (according to the lawsuit) was that the video showed the house number of a Facebook executive who they were trying to interview. In the lawsuit, O'Keefe's lawyers try to make a big deal of the fact that real media organizations sometimes show where people live as well, leaving out the fact that this does not matter one tiny bit. Twitter sets the rules on its own platform, and when it's making decisions on the rules, they often involve context (and that context may include Project Veritas' long history).