TWITTER’S TECHNOLOGICAL TYRANNY: PROJECT VERITAS EXPOSES TWITTER’S ANTI-CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL AGENDA~TWITTER ENGINEERS TO “BAN A WAY OF TALKING” THROUGH “SHADOW BANNING”

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

Project Veritas is at it again — this time exposing Twitter as part
of the “American Pravda” of fake news designed to manipulate the way
people think by controlling their access to information and being “more
than happy” to violate users’ trust to help the government.

Project Veritas (veritas is Latin for truth) has already exposed major media — including CNN and the New York Times
— as part of its “American Pravda” series. Now, James O’Keefe — the man
behind Project Veritas — is turning his attention toward social media.
In an undercover video published Tuesday, O’Keefe shows that a Twitter
engineer says the company is “more than happy to help the Departmet of
Justice [DOJ] in their little investigation” by turning over all of
President Trump’s tweets and direct messages (Twitter’s version of
private messaging) to the DOJ — “even the ones he’s deleted.”

In the video, Senior Network Security Engineer Clay Haynes is shown
chatting with a young lady that he does not know is a Project Veritas
undercover journalist. He also does not know he is being recorded. That
recording happened on January 3. In answer to the young lady’s question,
“So you’re not a Trump lover?” Haynes says, “No.” He goes on to say,
“We’re more than happy to help the Department of Justice in their little
investigation.”

After the undercover journalist asks, “Okay, like how” and giggles
approvingly, Haynes elaborates. (As an aside, do these guys never
learn?) He answers her by saying, “Basically, giving them every single
tweet he’s posted — even the ones he’s deleted.” With the journalist
prompting him by saying, “Okay,” Haynes continues, “Any direct messages,
any mentions, oh yeah.”

He justifies his actions and those of his employer by saying, “I
don’t like being part of the machine that is contributing to America’s
downfall,” obviously referring to the fact that President Trump uses
Twitter for its intended purpose: mass communication. It seems that
since Haynes and his coworkers don’t like the message, they can
manipulate the system with a clear conscience.

While Twiiter has defended itself for not simply banning the president from its platform,
Haynes says the company has “had internal reviews about that.” Speaking
for himself, Haynes can be seen saying President Trump is “dangerous,”
adding, “don’t like him and he’s a terrible human being and I want to
get rid of him.” Twitter’s hypocrisy is evident: The social media giant
wants to be seen as tolerant and unbiased, while working against those
self-proclaimed values behind the scenes.

Another part of the video — filmed last week — shows Haynes talking
to an undercover and disguised James O’Keefe, who asks him about Twitter
“helping the Department of Justice in their little investigation.”
Haynes, was not willing to comment. James O’Keefe, you see — even in
disguise — is not a young lady.

But his previous statements paint a pretty damning picture. “So, what
we can do on our side is actually very terrifying,” he told the female
undercover journalist, going on to explain, “We have full access to
every single person’s account, every single direct message, deleted
direct message, deleted tweets — I can tell you who exactly logged in
from where, what username and password, when they changed their
password.” He also said that one reason Twitter keeps those logs is that
“it helps us detect a pattern of history.”

Haynes described the practice as “very, very dangerous,” and “very, very creepy Big Brother-ish.” No doubt.

And while many conservatives — including ostensibly President Trump —
use Twitter on a daily basis, Haynes made it clear that there is no
room for the conservative mindset at the company. “I’m a bleeding-heart
liberal,” he said, adding, “I think it comes with the territory.”

In the “internal reviews” held at Twitter about banning President
Trump’s account, Haynes said he “wasn’t the only one that basically said
that if we let this maniac — something along the lines of, if we let
this maniac continue, we would have a hard time finding another job.”

While the left-leaning philosophy of Twitter is not breaking news,
the degree to which the company would be “more than happy to help the
Department of Justice with their little investigation” is chilling.
Especially considering that a senior engineer at the company realizes
that the methods for doing that are “very, very dangerous,” and “very,
very creepy Big Brother-ish.”

O’Keefe ends the video by pointing out that while it is not known
whether Twitter has been subpoenaed for that information, it shouldn’t
really matter. After all, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted Twitter’s
support of Apple last year when Apple refused to comply with an order to
break into the iPhone of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook because
of the privacy implications involved. That tweet said, “We stand with
@tim_cook [Apple’s CEO] and Apple (and thank him for his
leadership)!”and carried a link to Tim Cook’s open letter explaining his
company’s decision. Apparently that was then and this is now.

Also, that was a terrorist and this is President Trump. And while Apple was right to stand its ground
and Twitter was right to support Apple, right appears to have nothing
to do with Twitter being “more than happy” about violating a user’s
trust if that user is @realDonaldTrump. Because this isn’t about right;
it’s about the Left.

This is a developing story and The New American will keep our readers updated.
_______________________________________________________

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

Former and current Twitter employees are caught on camera
admitting they censor political views they disagree with — without the
censored users even realizing it.

In the second undercover video in three days, Project Veritas has
continued to expose Twitter as part of the “American Pravda.” While the
first video showed a senior engineer at Twitter saying that the company
is “more than happy to help the Department of Justice with their little
investigation” into President Trump, this video helps explain why that
may be.

The new hidden camera video — published Thursday — features “nine
current and former Twitter employees” admitting to “steps the social
media giant is taking to censor political content that they don’t like,”
according to Project Veritas.

The video opens with a montage of damning quotes before showing those
quotes in context. Far from being less daming when seen in context,
they are more so. The video — showing current and former Twitter
employees admitting to the practice — focuses on something called
“shadow banning.” Imagine if Twitter wanted to silence you. If they ban
you outright — suspend or delete your account — it would be obvious and
you may take to another platform to denounce the company for censorship.
But what if they simply press the digital “mute button” on your tweets?
Your account is still “active” and you can still post, but no one
except you will ever see it.

Shadow banning and outright banning seem to be the tools of choice
for silencing conservative voices — especially those that support
President Trump and his policies.

Olinda Hassan is a policy manager in Twitter’s Trust and Safety
department, which she describes as “controversial.” Her team makes the
rules and regulations for the platform’s millions of users. They are the
gatekeepers. As Hassan explained, Twitter is “working on” a way to
silence certain people and ideas on the platform. “Yeah, it’s something
we’re working on — where we’re trying to get the shi**y people not to
show up,” she told the undercover journalist, adding, “It’s a product
thing we’re working on.”

To narrow down exactly who those “shi**y people” are that Twitter is
trying to keep from “showing up” in your timeline, the Project Veritas
video shows Mo Norai, a former content review agent at Twitter, saying,
“Let’s say if was a pro-Trump thing and I’m anti-Trump, I was like, ‘I
banned his whole account.’ It goes to you, and then it’s at your
discretion. And if you’re anti-Trump, you’re like, ‘Oh, you know what?
Mo was right, f*** it, let it go.’”

Norai went on to say that “discretion” — which he described as “I
guess how you felt about a particular matter,” plays a huge role in what
content gets banned at Twitter. As an example, Norai said, “If they [a
user] said, ‘This is pro-Trump, I don’t want it because it offends me,’”
the next step would be, “I say, ‘I banned this whole thing’ and it goes
over here and you’re like, “Oh, you know what? I don’t like it, too.
You know what? Mo’s right. Let it go.’”

So, based on a Twitter employee not liking something because it’s
pro-Trump, an entire account can be banned. How’s that inclusive
environment working out for you, Twitter?

Because Norai said that during his time at Twitter, left-leaning
posts that were tagged as possibly offensive were allowed to remain. “It
would come through checked and then I would be like, ‘You know what?
This is okay. Let it go.’”

Twitter has a “lot of unwritten rules,” Norai said. Those rules
largely dealt with what content was acceptable and what content was not.
Here is a clue: Conservative content was removed while liberal content
was allowed to stay.

Pranay Singh is a Direct Messaging engineer at Twitter. He said that
the suspension of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s Twitter account may
have been because of “the U.S. government pressuring” Twitter. He said,
“They do that.” In fact, he said it happens “all the f***ing time.” In
Assange’s case, he said the U.S. government doesn’t like “people messing
with their politics, and [Assange] has sh*t on a lot of people.”

As for the tactic of shadow banning a user, Abhinav Vadrevu, a former
software engineer at Twitter, said, “One strategy is to shadow ban so
that you have ultimate control.” He added, “The idea of a shadow ban is
that you ban someone, but they don’t know they’ve been banned because
they keep posting, but no one sees their content.” On the psychological
side of the equation, this creates a situation where the users just
think their posts — their ideas — aren’t appealing to anyone. “So they
just think no one is engaging with their content when in reality, no one
is seeing it,” Vadrevu said.

Vadrevu admitted that the practice “is risky” because “people will
figure that sh** out.” He also said that it would cause “bad press” and
that “it’s like, unethical in some way, you know? So, I don’t know.”
Clearly.

Another former Twitter engineer, Conrado Miranda, told an undercover
journalist that shadow banning as a way of political censorship is “a
thing.” It happens at Twitter. As he explained the process, “we have a
bunch of filters removing some tweets” and “kicking out some of them.”

Singh helped explain the types of tweets that are likely not to make
the cut. “Just go to a random (Trump) tweet and just look at the
followers,” he said. Those followers will “all be like guns, God,
’Merica, like and with the American flag and like, the cross.” He said
the way to get rid of those users — all of whom he assumes are bots, not
real users, because, “Like who says that? Who talks like that?” — is to
“just delete them.” But since “there are hundreds of thousands of them”
and that volume can’t be handled by people, “you got to, like, write
algorithms to do it for you.”

So, Twitter’s response to posts and users it doesn’t agree with is to
assume they are not real and turn a few lines of computer code loose to
delete them without any human verification process. It appears that
posts that are anti-gun, anti-God, anti-America, with rainbow flags and
pentagrams would escape that vetting process, even if they were posted
by bots. Smooth, Twitter, smooth.

Perhaps most shocking is the statement by Steven Pierre, a software
engineer at Twitter. Speaking on hidden camera, he said that Twitter is
developing a way to automate the whole process of what gets seen and
what doesn’t. “Every single conversation is going to be rated by a
machine” that will decide whether the conversation is “positive” or
“negative.” If it’s negative, “They may have a point, but it will just,
like, vanish,” he said. When asked whether this would “ban certain
mindsets,” he said no. “It’s going to ban, like, a way of talking.”
Twitter, where never is heard a discouraging word — or an honest word.

If that isn’t Pravda, nothing is. Between filtering,
banning, shadow banning, and manipulating what users see, Twitter is
dangerously close to a thought-control platform. In its first video
on Twitter, released Tuesday, Project Veritas showed Clay Haynes, a
senior network security engineer at Twitter, saying, “I don’t like being
part of the machine that is contributing to America’s downfall,”
obviously referring to the fact that President Trump uses Twitter for
its intended purpose: mass communication. If he meant that, he should
quit his job, because Twitter is clearly part of that machine.