Following a recent report from Project Veritas revealing insider info from Facebook whistleblowers relating to the company’s handling of vaccine discussion, James O’Keefe and his investigative team have now revealed that the company “filters” content that expresses vaccine skepticism based on values such as supporting liberty or personal religious beliefs.
Breitbart News recently reported that Project Veritas allegedly spoke with two Facebook whistleblowers that revealed a trove of internal Facebook documents detailing a plan to curb “vaccine hesitancy” (VH) on a global scale. The goal of the feature is reportedly to “drastically reduce user exposure” to VH comments.
The program also aims to force a “decrease in other engagement of VH comments including create, likes, reports [and] replies.” This revelation moved two Facebook whistleblowers to come forward to Project Veritas to reveal the full extent of Facebook’s censorship efforts.
One whistleblower noted that the company uses a tier system to determine how a comment should be censored or downranked on the platform. Comments including “shocking stories,” that describe potentially true or actually true events or facts that can raise “safety concerns” are allegedly demoted across the platform.
Now, in a follow-up report, Project Veritas claims that in addition to classifying Coroanvrirus-related comments into a Tier 1 and Tier 2 system in an attempt to demote “Vaccine Hesitancy,” the company also has a third Tier 3 category which “filters” content expressing objections or skepticism about vaccines, based on personal beliefs or opinions.
According to Project Veritas, these beliefs and opinions include “Liberty-based objections or skepticism,” “Religious-based objections or skepticism,” “Personal objections or skepticism,” “Political & Institutional-based vaccine objections or skepticism,” and “Development-based vaccine objections or skepticism.”
Reportedly included in the Tier 3 “Vaccine Hesitancy” list to be filtered were comments that include: “Expressing objections or concerns about being pressured to vaccinate by a vaccine registry or ‘vaccine passports.’”
These comments are reportedly not “demoted” as Tier 2 comments are, instead they receive the action “FB+IG: Filter from preview/inline,” which means that the comment will not be prominently featured in comment sections under Facebook or Instagram posts.
A Facebook spokesperson commented on the issue simply stating: “We proactively announced this policy on our company blog and also updated our help center with this information.”
Read more at Project Veritas here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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