An exposé of Facebook by James O’Keefe and the investigative journalists at Project Veritas reveals the depths of the anti-conservative bias within the company’s content moderation team.
James O’Keefe’s investigative journalism team Project Veritas released a new video today featuring comments from Facebook insiders and contractor employees revealing just how deep anti-conservative bias runs at the company.
Project Veritas went undercover at Facebook along with Accenture and Cognizant, which provide the contractors that handle Facebook’s content moderation. In undercover videos captured by Project Veritas, employees can be seen and heard acknowledging anti-Trump and anti-conservative bias at Mark Zuckerberg’s company, with some employees outright stating their intention to ban pro-Trump content on the platform.
One Cognizant employee, Daniel Will, stated on video: “I think they’re [Facebook] very biased with who they protect. They already shadowban, Facebook is notorious for it. They say they don’t, but it’s clear that people’s content doesn’t come up because its been de-filtered off the queue.”
In another video, a Cognizant employee working as a social media content moderator states “if someone is wearing a MAGA hat, I’m going to delete them for terrorism.”
A former Cognizant employee named Zach McElroy came to Project Veritas with his findings while working at the content moderation company, outlining the bias he perceived within the company and across Facebook. McElroy wrote in a post on Medium.com:
During the interview I found out the platform I’d be working for would be Facebook/Instagram, which I had already suspected given the nature of the job description. I was shown examples of just what “content” I would be “moderating”, which included racist memes, people bullying each other, and gore like you’d have seen on /b/ or LiveLeak years ago. But for the most part, my day-to-day content feed was largely incoherent rants and WorldStar fight videos.
I should note that the focus of most reporting on this job by other outlets seems to have focused entirely on this aspect of the job. The PTSD that workers have claimed to develop as a result of viewing such vile imagery has been brought to light multiple times in multiple high-profile articles, even resulting in a class-action lawsuit which Facebook recently settled for $52M — in fact, this negative press is precisely what led to all my coworkers and I being laid off earlier this year.
Training for the job lasted about a month and covered their entire internal policy in detail. I came into this job as a conservative, and immediately I took notice of highly objectionable biases in Facebook’s guidelines, from ideologically-based policies and definitions to allowing things to be posted that could get people killed. But what was I going to do about it? Leak documents on 4chan? Go to the media? No one cares. I was just some nobody in a sea of nobodies. Indeed, Facebook famously seems to want to ignore their content moderators’ existence, which is most likely the reason this work is subcontracted in the first place — “it’s not their problem”. Their response to criticism of this has even been so astonishingly tone-deaf as to put signs around their campus which read “Contractors Are People Too”, as reported by Bloomberg in May 2019.
McElroy stated that upon seeing the work done by Project Veritas with Pinterest whistleblower Eric Cochran, he chose to come forward with his story. McElroy reached out to Project Veritas and within a short period of time was undercover within Cognizant recording employee’s conversations and exposing bias within the firm.
McElroy claimed that while working at Cognizant, a graphic image of President Trump having this throat cut was allowed on the platform while memes and cartoons about former Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke were removed from the platform:
Donald Trump Jr. commented on Project Veritas’ video stating: “More truth about Facebook and the social media masters. Enough is enough we can’t let them interfere with elections any longer.”
Read more at Project Veritas here.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.