FISM News

Twitter reinstates Babylon Bee, Jordan Peterson, Project Veritas, others

by Jacob Fuller

Vicky Arias, FISM News

 

Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, announced Friday that the accounts of The Babylon Bee, Jordan Peterson, and Kathy Griffin were reinstated. On Saturday, former President Donald Trump’s account was reinstated, followed by Project Veritas on Sunday.

Musk has been a vocal advocate for freedom of speech, stating that it was one of his reasons for buying the social media platform.

“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square,” Musk posted in October.

The satirical Christian account of The Babylon Bee was suspended from Twitter after publishing a joke about Health and Human Services assistant secretary, Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender government official who identifies as female.

The joke, deemed by Twitter to be hateful, was posted to The Babylon Bee’s account earlier this year. It congratulated Levine for being 2022’s “Man of the Year.”

Jordan Peterson also published a tweet that got him banned by Twitter for being hateful. In June, Peterson questioned transgender treatments by drawing attention to the actor, Elliot Page, formerly known as Ellen Page, who now identifies as male.

“Remember when pride was a sin?” Peterson asked, “and Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician?”

Comedian Kathy Griffin received a ban under Musk’s leadership after posing as him on her Twitter account.

The Babylon Bee, Peterson, and Griffin have all been reinstated.

As for former President Donald Trump, Musk put the decision to reinstate his account to a poll on Saturday, which received over 15 million votes. A little over half of the votes, 51.8%, were in favor of bringing back Trump’s account.

Trump, whose account had been banned since January 8, 2021, for “inciting violence,” showed little interest in returning to the platform.

“I don’t see any reason for it,” Trump said, according to Reuters. The former president has previously stated he is happy on his own social media platform, Truth Social, and has no plan to return to Twitter.

Project Veritas is back

The account of Project Veritas, an investigative journalism outlet, was also restored after its suspension in 2021 for “violat[ing] Twitter’s rules against ‘posting private information,’” according to the Post Millennial.

Project Veritas had posted a video of Guy Rosen, Vice President of Facebook, admitting that the tech giant has the ability to freeze the comments sections of posts that might contain hate speech. Project Veritas is known for undercover investigations that often expose censorship across big tech.

Controversy over Musk’s handling of content on Twitter prompted some advertisers to rethink staying on the platform. According to the New York Post, in early November, Musk said that activists were putting pressure on companies to pull advertising from the platform “after a group of more than 40 civil rights and activist groups penned an open letter to Twitter’s top 20 advertisers, urging their leaders to pull ads unless Musk agrees to crack down on hate speech.”

Those “activist groups” have direct ties to Hillary Clinton, Black Lives Matter, and other leftist leaders and organizations.

In a tweet on Friday, Musk announced that “hate tweets” will be demonetized.

“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” Musk stated. “Negative/hate tweets will be max-deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from [the] rest of [the] internet.”

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