Senate Investigation Uncovers Why Eventbrite Censored Riley Gaines
It's no secret that tech companies have long made it one of their primary goals to enforce and promote their political ideologies.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, tech and social media censored accurate information critical of mask mandates or vaccine passports, because it contradicted what their ideology's preferred "experts" believed. Perhaps the most famous example was the blatant censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Twitter, Facebook and others suppressed posts referencing the story because it was damaging to their preferred presidential candidate. Despite the original reporting being entirely accurate.
But it's not just these obvious examples where politically motivated censorship continues to raise its pernicious head. Late in 2023, the ticketing and promotional platform Eventbrite participated in one of the more egregious incidents of ideological discrimination. Eventbrite restricted the ability of OutKick's Riley Gaines to promote one of her speaking events, while allowing promotion of Hamas-supporting events.
READ: Eventbrite Prohibits Riley Gaines Event Promotion, But Allows Pro-Hamas Listings
Now a massive new report from Senator Ted Cruz and the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation has revealed just how pernicious this censorship industrial complex has become. Detailing how companies like Eventbrite create purposefully vague terms and conditions, then rely on monstrously biased interpretations of their terms to justify shutting down individuals or events that they disagree with politically.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) discussed a new bill that seeks to protect college sports and limit federal involvement. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Eventbrite Has Little Justification For Canceling Events Other Than Ideological Disagreement
When Eventbrite removed the Gaines event from their platform, they provided little explanation of their decision making.
The company's chairman however, went on a series of extremist rants on Twitter, prompting a response from Gaines on the company's hypocrisy.
READ: Riley Gaines Hits Back At Eventbrite After Blatant Hypocrisy
Despite deleting some pro-Hamas events after they were exposed, there was never an explanation as to what Gaines had done, according to Eventbrite, to warrant her event being removed. Until now.
The Cruz report found that Eventbrite's entire rationale boiled down to tweets that the company found offensive. With one tweet in particular mentioned, largely because it accurately identified what makes women, women, within the context of concerns over violence in the Middle East as well as her stance on protecting women's sports.
"This October 10th (X/X), we're celebrating Real Women's Day," Gaines tweeted. "Ya know, the kind that can give birth and breastfeed and menstruate and lack a Y chromosome. The only kind of women. Women are not menstruators, bleeders, chestfeeders, cervix-havers, uterus-owners, egg-producers, or people with birthing capacity. Women are just women. Adult human females. I would be remiss if I didn't specifically say this day should be used to celebrate and honor the girls and women squarely in harms way because of the violence that has broken out in the Middle East and everything it has led to."
This scientifically accurate statement from Gaines was apparently just too much for the Eventbrite censorship team. The Senate Committee conducting the investigation asked Eventbrite about Gaines' statement. And the response was predictably ridiculous.
"The Committee asked Eventbrite whether Gaines’s statement in her October 10, 2023 post on X that ‘Real Women . . . lack a Y chromosome’ violated Eventbrite’s policy because it disparaged someone’s perceived gender," the report explains. "Eventbrite replied that the post ‘speaks for itself.’"
Yes. Yes it does. Adult human females are women and women's spaces and competitions should be protected. Eventbrite disagrees with this, in defiance of science, because their institutional political ideology also disagrees with science.
It's a profound reminder of just how pernicious modern censorship has become, how broken our cultural discourse is and how far removed from sanity and reason many tech companies are. Gaines' post is an accurate representation of reality. How Eventbrite handled it "speaks for itself." And discredits the company even further.