Conservative activist and founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe, on Monday, sued Twitter for defamation, claiming that the social media giant falsely accused him of creating fake accounts in order to justify banning him from the platform.
O’Keefe is suing for compensatory damages and to stop Twitter from spreading “false, misleading, and defamatory” information about him and remove any past such statements from anywhere they are posted.
Twitter banned O’Keefe on Thursday shortly after his media organization, Project Veritas, released a controversial video from an undercover operation in which a CNN technical director was documented on video saying that the cable news giant contributed to the 2020 defeat of former President Donald Trump from office and talking about how the coronavirus pandemic is “gangbusters with ratings.”
A Twitter spokesperson told the Washington Examiner last week that O’Keefe had broken Twitter’s platform manipulation policy by misleading others on Twitter by operating fake accounts and added that “you can’t artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts.”
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In his lawsuit filed Monday, O’Keefe said the accusations of him operating fake accounts on Twitter and “misleading others” was a disinformation campaign similar to that of the Russian government in interfering in the U.S. election in 2016.
“The false accusation that Mr. O’Keefe operated ‘fake accounts’ is particularly damaging for Mr. O’Keefe because Mr. O’Keefe is a journalist. As such, his reputation for transparency and accurate reporting is fundamental to his profession,” the suit said.
The complaint states that Twitter acted with “reckless disregard” for the “falsity of this claim,” in particular because the company has made various statements in the past few years claiming to have success in removing fake accounts after the Russian disinformation campaign.
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O’Keefe’s suit argues that if Twitter’s claims about fake accounts are accurate, then it would be able to confirm if an individual was operating multiple fake accounts and authenticate the identities of those people, which it has not done with O’Keefe.
