Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe has Twitter account restored, Project Veritas still suspended possibly banned

Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe had his account restored by Twitter late Thursday night following restrictions placed on the account by Twitter Thursday morning. Twitter also suspended the Project Veritas account.

O'Keefe and Project Veritas had appealed the decision.

The accounts were targeted after Project Veritas released a video showing Facebook Vice President Guy Rosen admitting that the social media platform "freezes" comment sections on posts where they suspect, but have not necessarily have confirmed, that "hate speech" is taking place.

"We have a system that is able to freeze commenting on threads in cases where our systems are detecting that there may be a thread that has hate speech or violence," Rosen said. "These are all things we've built over the past three-four years as part of our investments into the integrity space, our efforts to protect the election."

According to Twitter, Project Veritas' video showing Rosen violated Twitter's rules against "posting private information."

In a new video posted by O’Keefe announcing the return to the platform, he claimed that media pressure had been a contributing factor in the suspensions and restrictions being lifted. "Brian Fong from CNN just sent us an email. And he said, I heard back from Twitter after I asked him about your screenshot. This suggests Project Veritas could have its account restorative if it deletes the tweet. I'm told that the communication was sent in error and the suspension is in fact permanent."

O’Keefe continued, "What they did here was they would had previously allowed us to delete the tweet. We chose to take the risky option (appeal). They contradicted themselves. They told The New York Times one thing, and then they took it back and they changed their mind. So the appeal process is a joke. They never said you can appeal this, but there is no such thing because once the media people…started contacting them, it was game over."

The Project Veritas founder then demonstrated on camera that he was cancelling the appeal on his personal account and able to log back into his account after deleting the flagged tweet. While doing so, O’Keefe slammed Twitter’s actions. "There's nothing in this tweet that violates anyone's privacy. I'm simply quoting a Facebook Vice President on a matter of utmost public concern, probably more of a newsworthy issue than the standard oil monopoly of a hundred years ago. But I'm going ahead and delete this against my own conscience so that I can utilize our Twitter account moving forward."

The suspension of Project Veritas and O’Keefe comes as conservatives continue to raise concern over the censorship of conservatives by big tech companies, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Amazon.