PROJECT VERITAS: FACEBOOK MODERATORS BRAG ABOUT DELETING PRO-TRUMP CONTENT
BY LUIS MIGUEL
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
In its latest exposé, Project Veritas acquired smoking-gun evidence of political bias among Facebook’s ostensibly objective content moderators, with one company employee even boasting that she unjustifiably deletes posts by users wearing MAGA hats.
A video published by Project Veritas showed its undercover journalist using hidden cameras at Facebook offices interacting with moderators, who admitted to routinely deleting conservative content while leaving up anti-Trump content even if it violates the platform’s policy.
Facebook insider Zach McElroy told Project Veritas, “We are essentially in charge of what gets said and what gets stifled.” He also stated that 75-80 percent of the posts selected for moderator review by Facebook’s algorithm support President Trump and Republican or conservative causes.
One example caught on screenshot by McElroy was a post by President Trump on Facebook about Republican successes such as the election of a GOP governor in Mississippi. While the president’s account is labeled “Verified and Shielded,” an innocent post that said nothing more than “Cleaning up the house” alongside heart emojis is flagged for moderation in the Single Review Tool.
One of the moderators was asked if she deletes every Republican item that arrives in her queue, to which she emphatically replied, “Yes! I don’t give no f*cks, I’ll delete it.”
That same moderator confessed to never taking down anti-Trump content that is in violation of Facebook’s rules.
“You gotta take it down but I leave it up,” she said. “If you see something that’s not supposed to be up, it’s probably me.”
A moderator named Lara Kontakos, when asked what she does when she sees pro-Trump posts, said, “If someone is wearing a MAGA hat, I am going to delete them for terrorism.”
Looking around the room, Kontakos added, “I think we are all doing that.”
Steve Grimmett, who works as a content review lead, said Facebook has an ingrained anti-Trump culture. “It’s a very progressive company, who’s very anti-MAGA.”
James O’Keefe, Project Veritas’ founding CEO, placed these confessions in context:
Zach McElroy’s story raises serious doubts about the Capitol Hill testimony of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who gave lawmakers the impression that his company only takes content that could cause harm, such as relating to terrorism or hate speech, but never for politics.
Facebook and other social media platforms are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, because they claim that unlike traditional publishers that do not actively edit content — they say they are like the phone company just stringing wires on poles.
Facebook’s $400 billion market capitalization is tied to this protection and our report shows for the first time anywhere Facebook’s robust and human-directed process for restricting the marketplace of ideas, which calls into question their CDA 230 immunity.
In 2018, Zuckerberg testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, saying, “There is absolutely no directive in any of the changes that we make to have a bias in anything that we do. To the contrary, our goal is to be a platform for all ideas.”
Project Veritas’ video comes just days after The National Pulse found that Lead Stories, one of Facebook’s partners for fact-checking, counts among its staff many Democratic Party donors (but no Republican donors) and former CNN employees. That includes Editor-in-Chief Alan Duke, who worked for CNN as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years, and Senior Editor Monte Plott, a former editor for the Cable News Network’s digital platform for over a decade.
The International Fact-Checking Network, which certified Lead Stories’ fact-checkers, is funded by progressive entities such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
The National Pulse’s finding came after one of its stories, which examined Black Lives Matter’s ties to the Democratic Party, was flagged as “partly false” by Facebook fact-checkers.
Last month, President Trump signed an executive order that aims to narrow their liability protections.
The Department of Justice has similarly made proposals to limit social platforms’ liability in the case of content involving online child exploitation and sexual abuse, terrorism, or cyberstalking.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has introduced legislation that would allow Americans to sue major tech platforms such as Google and Facebook if they selectively censor political speech.
“Section 230 has been stretched and rewritten by courts to give these companies outlandish power over speech without accountability. Congress should act to ensure bad actors are not given a free pass to censor and silence their opponents,” Hawley said in a statement.