VERITAS: Whistleblower Exposes Facebook’s Biased Anti-Conservative Content Moderation Policies

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Jun 23, 2020

Guerrilla journalism outfit Project Veritas released information on Tuesday from a Facebook insider who is blowing the whistle about the company’s biased anti-conservative content moderation policies.

Zach McElroy, who was formerly a content moderator for Facebook employed by the firm, Cognizant, spoke out against the company’s Big Brother censorship policies to Veritas.

“Facebook is, needless to say, a behemoth of a company, and most people – including most of my former coworkers who didn’t even find these abuses objectionable – would be terrified of ever speaking out publicly against them,” McElroy wrote on his GoFundMe page.

“Threatening NDAs ensured most of our silence, but nothing can stop the truth, and the courage of past [Veritas] whistleblowers gave me the confidence to step forward and expose the company for its egregious stifling of free speech and rampant abuse toward conservative voices,” he added.

The Veritas disclosure showed McElroy speaking with James O’Keefe, the organization’s founder, about how Facebook censors conservative content. It also features candid remarks from other content moderators explaining or even bragging about how they crush right-wing dissent on the platform.

“Facebook is notorious for it,” said Facebook content moderator Daniel Will, referring to how the tech monopoly regularly shadowbans content. “And they say they don’t, but it’s clear that people’s content don’t come up because it’s been de-filtered off the queue.”

“It’s a very progressive company who’s very anti-MAGA,” said Steve Grimmett, who serves as the team lead of content review for Facebook content moderation firm, Accenture.

“If a Trump post was to come up and it was promoting Trump, then I can take that down, then I feel like that would be very impactful,” said Facebook content moderator Lara Kontakos.

“If someone is wearing a MAGA hat I’m going to delete them for terrorism and I’m just going to like go crazy,” Kontakos added.

McElroy explained to O’Keefe how Facebook knowingly operates under double standards that punish conservative spech, and how the company flouts their own terms of service to promote a left-wing political agenda.

“Well, this is an image, I believe it’s in an art museum in Portland. They put this up as a bit of a political statement,” McElroy said regarding a lewd drawing of President Trump getting his throat slit.

“Facebook actually reacted to this at least internally. They gave us a memo saying that this would not violate for violence or incitement, or anything else really, and so we were told to leave this image up,” he added.

To contrast, an anti-gun control meme featuring failed Democrat presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke getting shot with a cartoon gun by popular Looney Tunes character Elmer Fudd was banished from the platform.

That clip can be seen here:

Because of the work of Project Veritas, the Trump administration has all the ammo they need to crack down on Facebook and other tech entities that threaten democracy with their stranglehold over the flow of information in the digital public square.