Twitter has permanently suspended right-wing activist James O’Keefe over secretly filmed CNN videos.
The tech giant’s action comes after O’Keefe released the first instalment of a three part “#ExposeCNN” campaign filmed with hidden cameras.
His first video featured a CNN employee, Charles Chester, talking to an undercover journalist about his views on the news network’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election.
Twitter says that O’Keefe’s account “was permanently suspended for violating the Twitter Rules on platform manipulation and spam.”
And the company added: “As outlined in our policy on 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.’”
Mr Chester, a technical director for the network, made his comments when he believed he was on dates with a woman posing as a nurse.
“Look at what we did, we got Trump out,” Mr Chester said in the first video released by O’Keefe’s Project Veritas.
“I am 100 per cent going to say it. And I 100 per cent believe it that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out.”
In a second video Mr Chester says that the network played up the Covid-19 death toll to boost ratings.
“Fear really drives numbers. Covid? Gangbusters with ratings,” Chester told the fake date.
He also claimed that CNN president Jeff Zucker had a “red phone” that he would use to call the control room to tell producers to put the virus death tolls on screen.
