James O’Keefe claims that a Meta engineer admitted in a candid interview with an undercover journalist with O’Keefe Media Group that Facebook demotes anti-Kamala Harris posts.
Jeevan Gyawali, a senior software engineer with Meta, appeared to reveal in a hidden camera interview that accounts posting anti-Kamala Harris content could be shadowbanned while the posts get demoted.
“Say your uncle in Ohio said something about Kamala Harris is unfit to be a president because she doesn’t have a child, that kind of shit is automatically demoted,” Gyawali appeared to say in the heavily edited video.
Gyawali also appeared to say that the person “would not be notified,” which translates into a shadowban. The poster’s engagement and impressions would likely decrease. He also appeared to talk about Meta’s “Integrity Team” controlling content through something allegedly called “civic classifiers – a system meant to shadowban users.
“There is an integrity team,” he said. “That’s like a pretty significant team and they build all these classifiers.”
Later, he said, “The basic level of defense system that Facebook has built now is … they have built these things called civic classifiers – a large model that has been trained on civic content, so anything that it detects to have a civic content, is like demoted.”
“That means if anything is related to political content, it’s automatically not shown,” he added when asked to define “civic classifiers.”
“There is a SWAT team that’s already set up since April… just to think about all the scenarios of how the platform could be abused,” Gyawali also the undercover journalist.
Gyawali also appeared to admit that Meta has the ability to influence the 2024 election, adding that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stands behind that initiative.
As James O’Keefe admitted, the undercover journalist had set up a date with Gyawali on the dating app Bumble, so it remains to be seen if his claims were hard fact or slightly embellished to impress a date showing interest in his trade. O’Keefe claims that when he contacted Gyawali for comment, he responded “ah, fuck” before ending the call.
Meta executive Andy Stone posted a comment to X stating, “Exactly. An “undercover sting,” AKA a date, in which an engineer explained something Meta has been public about for years: we show less political content of all kinds and viewpoints because users have told us they want to see less of it.”
Update — This article has been updated with a comment made by a Meta executive on the video that was posted after publication