Salesforce, a cloud-based customer relationship management service (CRM), has banned messages “questioning the validity or integrity of the election” with its President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Bret Taylor claiming in a leaked video that such messages “may incite violence.”
In the video, which was published by the investigative reporting outlet Project Veritas and features leaked footage of an internal January 13 Salesforce meeting, Taylor discussed how Salesforce told the Republican National Committee (RNC) after the January 6 storming of the Capitol that “no messages on behalf of President Trump and no messages questioning the validity or integrity of the election are allowed on our platform under the guidelines that they may incite violence given the escalated conditions in the United States right now.”
Taylor also stated that Salesforce has recognized that “a much broader range of messages has the potential to incite politically motivated violence” and that “the national conversation about the role of technology in inciting that mob and disseminating misinformation and fomenting extremism” has impacted Salesforce.
He then questioned “the ethical responsibility of technology platforms when they’re directly or indirectly used to incite violence.”
The RNC is one of several Salesforce customers that have been impacted by Salesforce’s ban on messages that question the validity or integrity of the election and its focus on the responsibility of platforms to crack down on indirect incitement to violence.
In the same video, Project Veritas head and founder James O’Keefe revealed that Project Veritas was banned by Salesforce a couple of weeks after this internal meeting took place with Salesforce providing no explanation other than it being a “business decision.”
“Salesforce is deplatforming customers who question ‘the validity or integrity of the election,'” O’Keefe said. “So if you do any reporting on any issue pertaining to voter fraud, even if it’s 100% accurate, Salesforce will not allow that message. Therefore, based upon what Salesforce COO Taylor was saying, we, Project Veritas, can’t report our Texas voter fraud story where Racquel Rodriguez was arrested.”
Salesforce is the latest of several large technology companies to introduce sweeping restrictions that prohibit discussions about voter fraud.
YouTube now issues strikes and suspends channels that allege “widespread fraud, errors, or glitches” changed the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election. Facebook has banned the use of the phrase “Stop the Steal,” regardless of context. And Amazon has removed thousands of items that contained this phrase.
Facebook, like Salesforce, justified its restrictions by suggesting that such discussions “can lead to violence.” Yet while these tech companies are clamping down on discussions about voter fraud under this premise, they rarely use the same justifications to crack down on other movements where some bad actors call for violence.
