Facebook Whistleblower: ‘Civic Integrity’ Unit Shut Down After Trump Election Loss

Far left Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told lawmakers on the Senate Commerce Committee today that the platform should be regulated to stop “disinformation” and “hate,” but there was also a buried lede in her testimony — that Facebook wound down its “civic integrity” censorship immediately after the 2020 election.

Haugen admitted that Facebook made its own platform less viral in the runup to the election in an effort to prevent “dangerous” content, meaning that it was harder for content that wasn’t pre-approved to reach a wider audience. The most notorious example of this “Civic Integrity” regime, which Haugen was a part of, was the censorship of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden.

This would have implicitly favored the anti-Trump establishment media, which has its own distribution methods for reaching a wide audience.

She also revealed that Facebook itself admitted that its “civic integrity” regime impacted free speech before the election.

“Facebook has been emphasizing a false choice, they’ve said the safeguards that were in place before the election implicated free speech,” said Haugen. “Facebook changed those safety defaults in the run-up to the election because they knew they were dangerous.”

According to Haugen, after the election result, with the job done, Facebook promptly relaxed its restrictions on the virality of content on the platform, only to switch them back on after January 6th.

“Because they wanted that growth back, they wanted the acceleration on the platform back after the election, they returned to their original defaults,” said Haugen “And the fact that they had to ‘break the glass’ on January 6th and turn them back on, I think that’s deeply problematic.”

Haugen went on to say that the virality of content on Facebook should be diminished permanently — which would entrench the establishment media’s advantage.

“I encourage reform of these platforms, not picking and choosing individual ideas, but instead making the platforms themselves safer, less twitchy, less reactive, less viral, because that’s how we scalably solve these problems.”

Haugen said that if she were running Facebook, she would “immediately implement the ‘soft interventions’ that were identified to protect the 2020 election.”

Haugen complained that every time Facebook allowed user activity to run free, it clashed with “Civic Integrity” censorship.

“Regularly, integrity actions, projects that were hard-fought by the teams trying to keep us safe are undone by new growth products that counteract those same remedies.”

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.