Insider Probe Unveils Eventbrite’s Platform Ban Reasons

After my film “What is a Woman?” became one of the most-watched documentaries of all-time, there were a couple of different responses that Leftists could have had. The easiest response would have been to simply answer the question in the title.

Trans activists, the media, and politicians had the opportunity to provide a coherent, non-circular definition for the word “woman” — and then they would have immediately won the argument. That’s all they had to do. But, of course, trans ideology can’t provide a coherent definition of the word “woman,” so they refused to do it when I interviewed several of them for the film. And they haven’t been able to do it in the nearly two years since.

Instead, as I’ve discussed before, the Left lied about the film. They accused me of “transphobia” for allowing trans activists to explain — or rather, fail to explain — what they believe. But they didn’t stop there. On top of all the lies, one of the most powerful technology platforms in the county embarked on an effort to prevent me from speaking about the film. This platform, called Eventbrite, also tried to shut down screenings of the documentary. They claimed any event screening the film, or discussing it, violated their “Hateful Events Policy.”

If you’re not familiar with Eventbrite, it controls roughly 50% of the event management and registration market. They’re hard to avoid, even if you want to. And on at least seven occasions, they canceled events involving “What is a Woman?“, often costing event organizers like YAF thousands of dollars.

At the time, it seemed like just another example of a Left-wing company silencing political dissent. Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

But the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation decided to look deeper into what’s going on. Under the leadership of ranking member Ted Cruz (R-TX), the committee launched a congressional investigation into several instances in which online service providers canceled services for conservative organizations and speakers. The committee probed Eventbrite, and many other companies like it, to understand what was going on internally at these companies when they made these decisions to censor conservatives. And today, we can bring you the results of that investigation, exclusively.

Here’s the topline finding from their report, which outlines the Left’s strategy for attacking the freedom of speech and association:

This investigation revealed that Online Service Providers are following a new playbook for silencing conservatives that leftist organizations — including the notoriously biased Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—concocted: ‘removing infrastructure services’ that conservative organizations ‘need to operate’ by weaponizing their terms of service.

In other words, what Eventbrite did to “What is a Woman?” is part of a much larger effort to deplatform anyone who disagrees with the Left, particularly on the issue of transgenderism. This is their answer to me — as well as to Libs of TikTok, swimmer Riley Gaines, and nonprofits like the Independent Women’s Forum. They can’t debate us. They have to shut us down and prevent us from speaking.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

The committee’s investigation exposes this effort, in great detail, for the total fraud that it is. Publicly, companies like Eventbrite will claim that they’re combating “hate” and “disinformation” when they shut down events featuring my film, for example. But in reality, the committee found, no one at Eventbrite even watched “What is a Woman?” before they decided to ban all events themed around the film.

As the report states:

Eventbrite admitted to the Committee that no one involved in the decision watched What Is a Woman? film before cancelling the events. Eventbrite could not even identify a single timestamp in the trailer that it deemed to violate the Eventbrite Community Guidelines. According to Eventbrite: ‘[t]he overall tone and message of the all-encompassing trailer, in combination with Matt Walsh’s related public statements, helped determine the removals—not any individual timestamp.’

To restate, because this really is incredible: A Big Tech platform banned events involving my film, saying these events violated their “hateful events policy,” without even watching the film.

According to the committee, Eventbrite has a “Trust and Safety Team” that consists of at least 12 full-time employees who review every single case. Eventbrite describes these employees as “experts.” Experts in what? What are their qualifications? That’s never explained. But they certainly aren’t experts in the film because none of these “experts” saw the film that they wanted to ban. Instead, they looked at non-specific parts of the trailer, and my public statements.

So let’s review. Here’s the first 45 seconds or so of the trailer for “What is a Woman?”, which is probably more than Eventbrite’s experts watched:

That is the alleged “hateful content” that, apparently, Eventbrite finds disqualifying. No one can use Eventbrite to show the film or even discuss it. It’s not exactly convincing. So, maybe to cover their bases, Eventbrite told the committee that they banned my events for a few other reasons. Specifically, they said my public statements were hateful.

What public statements, exactly? Eventbrite provided three examples — all of them are from before the film was released.

The first example is my appearance on a Dr. Phil episode entitled “The Gender Pronoun Debate,” from January 19, 2022. The whole episode runs for the better part of an hour, and again, there’s basically no chance that Eventbrite’s experts watched it. But here’s a representative part:

According to Eventbrite, the fact that I used the words “mental illness,” “charade,” and “theatrical production” to describe men who pretend to be women, and vice versa, is evidence that I’m a very hateful person, and I shouldn’t be allowed to host events.

Additionally, Eventbrite says that in a May 2021 episode of this show, I discussed gender surgeries being performed on children — including double mastectomies — as morally akin to rape and child molestation. Apparently, that’s hateful. If you have a problem with child butchery, then Eventbrite won’t allow you to have a platform. They’re right, by the way. It is hateful. I do hate this kind of abuse against children.

There was one other objection that Eventbrite made, concerning the children’s book I wrote called “Johnny The Walrus.” Of course, they didn’t actually read this book, anymore than they watched my film. I can’t blame them though. The book is probably above their reading level. But it was featured at the beginning of my appearance on the Dr. Phil show, which is how I assume they heard about it. Watch:

So the book, as you probably know, is about a little boy who pretends to be a walrus. People encourage him to start changing his appearance and getting surgery to transform into a walrus. And the book takes the position that this is a bad idea. It teaches that human children should recognize that they are human children, not walruses. But to Eventbrite, this is apparently a problem. They told the committee that it’s hate, so it’s bad.

The funny thing is that, as the committee’s investigation makes clear, Eventbrite doesn’t really know what their hateful conduct policy even says. Either that or they lied to the committee.

As the report reads:

On February 27—days before the March 1 event—Eventbrite removed the event’s page from its website and notified the organizer that it had done so because the event violated the Eventbrite Community Guidelines. Eventbrite told the Committee that it sends a standard notification when removing an event for violating its Hateful Events Policy. As reflected in the figure below, however, in the version Eventbrite sent to the organizers of the Stanford event, Eventbrite directly stated that the problem with the Matt Walsh event was that it ‘expresse[d] views’ that violated the Eventbrite Terms of Service.

In other words, Eventbrite’s standard “Hateful Events Policy” doesn’t say anything about prohibiting certain views. They wrote up a custom notification just for one of my events, and then apparently forgot about it. This kind of ad hoc reasoning is extremely common on the Left and particularly among online service providers. It’s yet another symptom of an ideology without any real principles.

As I alluded to earlier, of course, this isn’t just affecting me. The committee outlines numerous other instances of online platforms shutting down events for conservatives, including a November 2023 event featuring the swimmer Riley Gaines at UC Davis.

The school’s College Republicans worked with Eventbrite to set up a registration page so that students could sign up and attend for free. But in late November, Eventbrite canceled the whole thing. They notified the organizers that events cannot espouse hatred or harass anyone based on a series of characteristics, including sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, gender identity, religion, ethnicity, or disability. Notably, Eventbrite doesn’t prohibit hatred based on “sex discrimination,” so it’s okay to deride women and pretend they don’t exist. Trans activists are free to do that all they want.

But Riley Gaines was shut down — not because of anything on her event page, but because she previously made social media posts affirming that biology is real. One of the posts cited by Eventbrite is an October 10, 2023, post from Gaines, in which she says:

Women are not menstruators, bleeders, chestfeeders, cervix-havers, uterus-owners, egg-producers, or people with birthing capacity. Women are just women. Adult human females.

According to Eventbrite, which apparently makes up its standards as it goes, that’s hateful conduct.

Along those lines, the committee investigated the communications platform Slack for canceling the workspace of Libs of TikTok. Slack informed the committee:

[w]hat makes [Libs of TikTok] problematic is that Libs of TikTok has a specific audience, and they are taking this information and posting it to that specific audience so that everyone in that audience sees it at the same time.

Now, I’ve read that explanation about five times, and it still doesn’t make any sense. But as best I can tell, they’re admitting that nothing Libs of TikTok said was objectionable. And really, it couldn’t be; she’s just reposting deranged content from Leftists. So instead of making any factual argument, Slack apparently complains that a lot of people are seeing the factual information provided by Libs of TikTok, and they’re becoming hateful as a result. Somehow this alleged audience reaction makes Libs of TikTok’s conduct a violation of Slack’s policies against “inciting hatred.”

She didn’t direct anyone to engage in any hateful conduct. She simply posted the truth about what’s happening. And that’s not allowed anymore.

This is a standard that obviously, if the Left were to employ against itself, would result in the immediate deplatforming of the Washington Post, pretty much every trans activist who’s ever used social media, the entirety of CNN and MSNBC and the rest of the legacy media. But it’s not a real standard and it’s not meant to be administered fairly. Instead, as the committee notes, this standard was essentially invented by the ADL, the SPLC, and other well-funded Left-wing activist groups.

Although Slack did not specifically point to them with regard to its Libs of TikTok investigation, notably, the left-wing SPLC has described Libs of TikTok as an ‘extremist’ account and ADL labeled Libs of TikTok/Chaya Raichik as an ‘extremist’ in its ‘Glossary of Extremism.’

The same designation applies to me. Quoting again from the report:

Eventbrite did not say that it relied on ADL in deciding to cancel the What Is a Woman? events, but notably ADL—which Eventbrite’s Trust and Safety Team generally relies on as a source—has labeled Matt Walsh as an ‘extremist commentator.’

This is the strategy that’s been unearthed by this congressional committee. Motivated in part by guidance from Left-wing activist groups, large online tech platforms are doing everything they can to make sure conservatives can’t communicate or stay in business. There are several other examples. For instance, the report says that the Independent Women’s Forum, or IWF, was kicked off the fundraising platform Bonterra for defending women’s rights. Bonterra categorized IWF as some sort of “anti-LGBT” outfit, whatever that means, all because they believe biology is real. Therefore, they’re not allowed to raise money, I guess.

In its report, the committee suggests that this situation could be resolved by legislation — or at least, addressed in some way by legislation. But the ideal resolution, as the committee suggests in its conclusion, is for new online service providers to flood the market and offer an alternative. That is the only response to this insanity that’s sustainable — and it’s a very workable solution.

Because of this committee’s investigation, we know that the companies censoring conservatives are really staffed with complete, bumbling morons who have no idea what they’re doing. That means they’re powerful, yes, but they’re also vulnerable. Now it’s time to replace them before they silence us.