In their latest investigation, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group spoke to a former Facebook employee who alleges that political bias at the social media giant is very real.
She cites specific examples of people who have been targeted and even says that Facebook is trying to influence elections.
Here are some highlights from the report:
Facebook Insider Leaks Docs; Explains “Deboosting,” “Troll Report,” & Political Targeting in Video InterviewProject Veritas has obtained and published documents and presentation materials from a former Facebook insider. This information describes how Facebook engineers plan and go about policing political speech. Screenshots from a Facebook workstation show the specific technical actions taken against political figures, as well as “[e]xisting strategies” taken to combat political speech…To gain a better understanding of the documents, Project Veritas spoke with the Facebook insider in an interview. The insider separated from Facebook in 2018 and was later hired by Project Veritas.“I saw things that were going on that I personally found to be troubling.”According to the insider, the documents revealed a routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. The technical action she repeatedly saw, and for which Project Veritas was provided documentation, was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution. Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.”
The insider also says Facebook has expanded the meaning of “hate speech” to include non-hateful terms which are specifically used by conservatives like MSM (mainstream media) and SJW (social justice warrior).
“They’re shifting the goal post”Also in the in the documents was a presentation, authored by Facebook engineers Seiji Yamamoto and Eduardo Arino de la Rubia, titled “Coordinating Trolling on FB.” Yamamoto is a Data Science Manager, and de la Rubia is a Chief Data Scientist at Facebook. The presentation appears to describe the current actions, as well as potential future actions, Facebook can take to combat alleged abusive behavior on the platform.Yamamoto, who is responsible for “News Feed Reduction Strategy,” also authored a post where he said Facebook should address “…quite a bit of content near the perimeter of hate speech.” Said the Facebook insider, the “perimeter of hate speech” means “things that aren’t actually hate speech but that might offend somebody. Anything that is perceived as hateful but no court would define it as hate speech.”The insider believes Yamamoto’s plans appears to be political in nature, rather than in response to abusive behaviors, “[i]t was clearly kind of designed… aimed to be the right wing meme culture that’s become extremely prevalent in the past few years. And some of the words that appeared on there were, using words like SJW… MSM… the New York Times doesn’t talk about the MSM. The independent conservative outlets are using that language.”
This is one of the most disturbing aspects of the report:
Yamamoto and de la Rubia’s presentation says that “troll accounts,” can have their internet bandwidth limited and experience forced glitches like frequent “auto-logout[s]” and the failed upload of comments. These “special features” would be triggered “leading up to important elections.”
Here are some other details via the Project Veritas Twitter feed:
Watch the whole report below. It’s 19 minutes long but worth the time:
Featured image via YouTube.
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