April 16, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Social media giant Twitter has quietly severed ties with the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) amid mounting reports of scandal within the organization and insider claims that SPLC’s “hate” monitoring is a money-making scam.

Twitter previously identified SPLC as a “safety partner” that helps weed out “hateful conduct and harassment” on the platform, but the Daily Caller reports that their partnership may no longer be the case. “The SPLC is not a member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council or a partner the company has worked with recently,” an anonymous source inside Twitter said. The SPLC no longer appears on the company’s Safety Partners list.

SPLC has long been controversial for its history of labeling mainstream Christian and/or conservative organizations – including Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, the Ruth Institute, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and Jihad Watch – “hate groups” to be blacklisted from various online platforms and services. The organization has managed to pressure companies like Mastercard and GoFundMe to (at least temporarily, in some cases) deny services to conservative figures and groups.

Over the past year it’s suffered a series of blows, such as being forced to make a public apology and pay $3.4 million in defamation damages to Maajid Nawaz’s Quilliam Foundation, the ouster of co-founder Morris Dees for “inappropriate conduct,” and testimony from insiders that the organization is a “highly profitable scam” and that Dees saw “civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals.”

Despite the ongoing scandals, Twitter appears to be the only major tech company distancing itself from SPLC. Facebook, Google, and Amazon continue to partner with SPLC to varying degrees to help determine which users to exclude and content to restrict on their platforms. Facebook, Google, and Amazon refused to give the Daily Caller a comment on its future with the organization.

“It is long overdue that social media companies stop using the hypocritical SPLC as a reliable source to police their content and discriminate against pro-family and conservative nonviolent organizations,” Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver said in response to the news. “The rest of the tech companies should follow Twitter’s lead and divorce from the SPLC. It appears to have taken a major implosion within the SPLC for others to finally see what organizations like Liberty Counsel have been saying all along.”

Dozens of center-right organizations are currently considering defamation suits against SPLC, and Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has called on the IRS to investigate SPLC for $121 million in offshore assets the organization keeps in non-U.S. equity funds.