The heavily-trafficked news aggregation site CitizenFreePress.com has been suspended from Twitter for sharing a clip of former President Barack Obama, campaigning in Pennsylvania in 2008, discussing potential problems with American voting machines and demanding paper trails for ballots.
CitizenFressPress.com (CFP) was not the only account to have shared the clip, though appears to be the only one that has received a suspension for doing so. Though the video can still be viewed on Elon Musk’s platform, it now carries a warning label which claims the video is “misleading,” as well as noting that the clip can no longer be replied to, shared, or liked.
The video is still shareable from other accounts, and still available on CSPAN. But someone at Twitter appears to be trying to nuke it, at least from CFP’s account:
https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1592919435538763782
CFP – started in 2016 by an editor who goes by the name “Kane” – attracted over 208 million page views in October, placing it above the Wall Street Journal, Politico, TMZ, HuffPo, ZeroHedge, Breitbart, NBC News, the Daily Wire, and many more news sites.
Kane told The National Pulse: “We absolutely love what Elon is doing at Twitter. We support his efforts 100 percent. We view this as an unfortunate mistake, that will hopefully be corrected, with urgency. We would like the suspension to be reversed and removed from our permanent record at Twitter, so the CFP account is not blackmarked going forward.”
“We also understand that Elon is going through hell right now at Twitter HQ, and we appreciate that he never stops fighting. He’s one of us.”
CFP also appears to account for a large amount of inbound Twitter referral traffic, raising questions as to whether a rogue employee at the social media giant is intentionally attempting to drive a wedge between Twitter and one of its regular traffic boosters. In a six and a half day period to midday on November 18th, CFP sent Twitter.com a whopping 1,034,573 clicks, as revealed by CFP’s own outgoing web data:
Barack vs. The Machines.
In the ostensibly offensive video, former President Obama can be seen campaigning at a rally at Kent State in Ohio.
Around 35 minutes into his speech, he begins to take questions, one of the first being from a lady who asks, “I would just like to know what you can say to reassure us that this election will not be rigged or stolen.”
But the lady isn’t a Capitol-rioting Republican. She’s a Democrat, echoing widespread sentiments of Democrats in the early 2000s, who claimed voting machines in America were rigging elections for Republicans.
The claims began around 2000-2004, as George W. Bush first defeated Al Gore in an election many on the left still claim was “stolen”, and then John Kerry. By 2008, it was a common Democrat talking point that they had to take control of the voting machines, which is precisely how Obama responded in the CFP clip:
“Well, it helps in Ohio but we have Democrats in charge of the machines,” he says to left-wing applause. He continues, in a now rare moment of frankness:
“But, look, I come from Chicago. I want to be honest, it is not as if it is just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past. Sometimes Democrats have, too. Whenever people are in power, they have this tendency to try to, you know, tilt things in their direction. That is why we have got to have, I believe, a voting rights division in the Justice Department that is non-partisan and that is serious about investigating cases of voter fraud, is serious about making sure the people are not being discouraged to vote. That is why the voting rights legislation was put in place a couple years ago to help the county clerks. We need paper trails on these new electronic machines, so that you actually have something that you can hang on to after you punched that letter to make sure it has not been hacked into.”
In other words, CFP’s clip eschews no context. Indeed, many more examples of Democrats admitting the flaws in machine voting across America exist, from high profile sources.
Stop the Steal 1.0.
Before Donald Trump there was The Atlantic magazine, and MSNBC, and Salon.com, and Democracy Now, to name just a few left-wing publications that were hyping stories of election steals across America.
MSNBC broadcast a single example of a machine flipping a vote from Obama to Romney in 2012. Democracy Now prominently featured John Kerry’s claims that his election was stolen by similar means in 2005. Salon.com insisted that because some of Mitt Romney’s former colleagues went on to work at election systems firms, the 2012 election would be flipped in his favor. The Atlantic even went so far as to bemoan Breitbart for ridiculing the left’s “stolen election” claims:
…during 2004’s election, Bush carried [Ohio] by more than 100,000 votes, even though exit polling showed Kerry winning. And a conspiracy theory was born. Fast-forward eight years later and election this close, and you can see why Salon is freaking out and Breitbart is telling everyone to chill out.
The far-left Post Carbon Institute went even further:
“Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it’s their country. Not ours. Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was… Nothing is going to happen; it’s going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county. Until we get rid of the machines.
“The people who put the software together—do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don’t deserve anything other than the lash.
“Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head.
“The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.”
Rules for Rightists.
Most of the left’s election denying sources are still online, freely available, and many belong to news outlets or journalists who routinely mock those on the right who make similar claims.
Currently, Twitter’s rules still appear to allow countless conspiracy theories to be peddled by the left, including major hoaxes that Musk himself has acknowledged are fake, such as Russiagate.
In stymieing massive conservative aggregation accounts like CitizenFreePress, however, Musk’s Twitter is acting in very much the same way as before he purchased it.
We at The National Pulse understand that it takes time to turn the ship around – we have even said so. But these policies allowing major conservative news distribution sites to sidelined for days, weeks, or months on end have to come to a halt, immediately.
Hi @elonmusk @Jason. @CitizenFreePres sends 1M+ a week uniques to Twitter but their account was suspended for posting a well known clip of Obama talking about Ohio election machines. Pls check it out & reverse this ban! Thank you. https://t.co/c54VT3upAj
— Raheem. (@RaheemKassam) November 18, 2022
