Facebook
Exposed
Government
US Election 2020
Project VeritasProject Veritas released a report on their insider investigation into Facebook’s political content moderation practices in regards to the upcoming election. One of the main takeaways, as Facebook insider Zach McElroy said, is that Facebook is “essentially in charge of what gets said and what gets stifled”, which is illustrated by the following excerpt from the report:
One of the content moderators was asked if she deleted every Republican item that came up on her queue, she said: “Yes! I don’t give no f*cks, I’ll delete it.”
The same moderator said she does not take down anti-Trump content, even if it did violate policy.
“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.”
Another content moderator, Lara Kontakos, was asked what she did when she saw a posts supporting the president: “If someone is wearing a MAGA hat, I am going to delete them for terrorism.”
Two days later, Project Veritas released another report of another Facebook content moderator, Ryan Hartwig, who became a whistleblower. In this report, Hartwig explained how Facebook’s election interference is not relegated to the US, but rather is global:
“I was seeing them interfering on a global level in elections. I saw a blatant exception that just targeted conservatives or favored liberals—and you know, we’re deleting on average 300 posts or actioning 300 posts a day,” said Arizona-based Facebook content moderator Ryan Hartwig. “If you magnify that by however many content moderators there are on a global scale, that’s a lot of stuff that’s getting taken down,” he said.