- Twitter has suspended the account of Gateway Pundit, a far-right website run by Jim Hoft.
- Hoft used the account to peddle false claims, including that the 2020 election results were invalid.
- Gateway Pundit joins the growing list of accounts suspended on Twitter for violating its policies.
- Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.
Twitter on Saturday suspended the account for Gateway Pundit, a far-right website that for years has spread false information and conspiracy theories, including disinformation about the 2020 presidential election.
In a statement to Forbes, a Twitter spokesperson said the account was suspended for “repeated violations” of its civic integrity policy, which prohibits users from tweeting “for the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes.”
—Michael Edison Hayden (@MichaelEHayden) February 7, 2021
Twitter did not immediately reply to Insider’s request for comment.
Jim Hoft, the founder and editor-in-chief of Gateway Pundit, operated the account.
The website had for years shared baseless conspiracy theories and false information, most recently echoing former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
When Democrat Joe Biden won the election, Trump for weeks refused to explicitly acknowledge his loss. In the hours after the race was called for Biden, Trump said the “election is far from over.”
He then doubled down and sought to overturn the results in state and federal courts across the country. The Trump campaign and the president’s allies had filed, and lost, dozens of lawsuits in multiple battleground states contesting the results.
And allegations of voter fraud have been struck down and disproven numerous times since Trump and his lawyers presented their arguments. The Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr, who’s repeatedly positioned himself as one of the president’s strongest defenders, conceded that neither the Justice Department nor the FBI found widespread evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Still, Trump continued to claim otherwise, posting frequently on his personal Twitter account – which has been permanently suspended – about widespread voter fraud and a “rigged” election.
Gateway Pundit doubled down on those false claims.
Just about a week ago, Hoft, using the Gateway Pundit Twitter account, pushed claims that some ballots cast for Biden were illegal, the Hill reported, referencing an archived version of the now-suspended account.
Bloomberg News reported that Hoft was one of the people pictured at Trump’s “Save America” rally on January 6, hours before violent rioters stormed the Capitol building.
—William Turton (@WilliamTurton) February 6, 2021
Almost immediately after the attack on the Capitol, social media platforms began suspending and permanently disabling accounts they say disseminate violent rhetoric.
The most prominent suspension was the account of Trump himself. Sidney Powell, the lawyer Trump tasked with proving his baseless claims of election fraud, was among the people whose accounts were suspended.
After Trump’s account was disabled, top conservatives began sharing their Parler accounts on the platform, encouraging their followers to follow them there. Parler became a flagship in alt-right communication, advertising itself as a platform for unregulated language and “free speech.”
Days after the presidential election, Parler download counts surged, signaling that the platform was at the time seeing an influx of new users. However, the app went offline in mid-January after several vendors, including Amazon, Apple, and Google, withdrew support for the site.