Sandy MaloneMamaroneck, NY – Project Veritas released a bombshell report on Tuesday that claims blatant bias of Facebook’s content moderation process has resulted in the intentional deletion of conservative content that doesn’t violate any policies.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has testified before Congress in the past that Facebook has no political bias.
But Zach McElroy went undercover at Cognizant, a company contracted by Facebook that was responsible for evaluating and censoring posts on a daily basis.
They claim to have captured content moderators were deleting perfectly acceptable posts because the moderators personally hated President Donald Trump.
Blue Lives Matter has had its ad account permanently banned from Facebook without explanation in another case of suspected bias.
McElroy said he was willing to testify that 80 percent of the posts he saw deleted by the Facebook moderation vendor were written by conservatives or Republicans.
Although Zuckerberg has said that Facebook doesn’t want to meddle in the 2020 elections, McElroy said that what the platform’s creator has said publicly doesn’t match what he’s doing privately with content moderation.
“Well, it’s very simple,” McElroy explained. “You’ve got a formula. You’ve got a workplace full of mostly liberal-leaning Democrats – leftists essentially – and they are being put in charge of moderating the entire public discourse.”
“Facebook and Instagram are very large platforms – one of the biggest – and our voices are in the hands of people who are almost entirely left-leaning and not right-leaning or otherwise unbiased,” he said.
“And in speaking with a lot of them, I have found out they are not at all shy to exercise their own political will in deleting or leaving up content,” McElroy added.
He said the problem grew worse as Cognizant’s contract for content moderation with Facebook was coming to a close, The Washington Times reported.
McElroy said that the “Civic Harassment Queue” to be reviewed was full of posts by conservatives and President Trump supporters.
“I saw upwards of 75 to 80 percent of the posts in that queue were from Republican pages,” he said.
In the video released by Project Veritas on June 23, numerous Cognizant employees described to McElroy in detail how they were working to eradicate President Trump from the Facebook platform one post at a time.
“If you see a conservative post, you just get rid of it right?” he asked one of the moderators in the video.
“Yes! I don’t give no f–ks. I’ll delete it,” the content monitor bragged.
“If someone is wearing a MAGA hat, I am going to delete them for terrorism,” another moderator told McElroy in the video.
Project Veritas released screenshots of Facebook posts that had been allowed to stay up despite the fact they contained imagery of President Trump having his throat slashed.
However, McElroy also provided a screenshot of a cartoon Elmer Fudd shooting former Presidential contender Beto O’Rourke with a cartoon gun and said that image was flagged and removed as “hate speech.”
“There’s no difference between the two. There’s no reason why the reaction to those posts would be different – it should be the same,” he said.
McElroy also captured pictures of messages instructing Cognizant moderators to make a hate speech “policy exception” after CNN’s Don Lemon said “white men are the biggest terror threat in this country.”
The message said they should “ignore” complaints on posts and comments surrounding Lemon’s remarks even if it violated their “dehumanizing speech” policy and justified it by saying it was “newsworthy.”
Project Veritas has said that it has more material exposing what Facebook has been doing, and promised to continue to their expose of the social media giant.
Project Veritas today released one of the most damning undercover investigation reports—this time insiders used hidden cameras to document rampant censorship occurring at social media giant: @Facebook. #ExposeFacebook https://t.co/bQX8hhx1hn
— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) June 23, 2020
Interestingly, Twitter red-flagged the Project Veritas tweet promoting the bombshell report on Facebook as “a website that fails to adhere to basic journalistic standards.”
Twitter further described Project Veritas as “the website of a conservative nonprofit the films undercover videos, sometimes with deceptively-edited footage, to discredit Democrats and liberals groups.”
You can see the Project Veritas video below:
Holly Matkin
