Meta Engineer Brags About Shadowbanning, SWAT Team, Election Interference
A Meta senior software engineer was reportedly caught on camera boasting about his company’s ability to manipulate elections.
Meta Senior Software Engineer Jeevan Gyawali was apparently caught on camera by James O’Keefe’s organization, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), smugly explaining how platforms silence speech. When asked if Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, could influence elections, the man responded, “Yes.” This would seem to contradict Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public letter disavowing further election interference.
The OMG undercover journalist asked, “You guys [Meta] have the ability to influence the outcome of the election?” The man identified as Gyawali replied, “Yes.” When asked if Zuckerberg supports his company’s political influence and agenda to assist the Democrat Party in winning elections, Gyawali nodded in agreement saying, “100%.”
The man identified by OMG as Gyawali explained how Meta can reportedly do this. “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 sh*t is automatically demoted.” He continued, “The person would not be notified,” but a decline would be visible in the user’s engagement on posts and impressions.
Gyawali told OMG that Meta’s so-called “Integrity Team” controls content through its “civic classifiers,” which is a system that “shadowbans” political posts without ever notifying the censored users.
The man identified as Gyawali also told OMG that Meta has a team of people brainstorming how to address potential election issues. When asked about what the platform is doing to prevent another 2016, Gyawali said “There is a SWAT team that’s already set up since, like I think April… just to think about all the scenarios of how the platform could be abused.” When challenged on so-called “disinformation,” a leftist term often used to describe dissenting opinions, Gyawali confidently asserted, “that’s all going to be demoted 100%.”
OMG has since released another video showing a Meta software engineer also admitting to biased, anti-Donald Trump censorship. Meta spokesman Andy Stone asserted in reply to OMG that Meta’s political censorship isn’t biased. Meta openly admits to suppression of political content on Instagram and Threads, but OMG’s videos seemingly expose bias in that censorship.
This kind of censorship can have a significant impact on elections. A 2020 MRC poll illustrated that Twitter and Meta’s effort to censor the Hunter Biden scandal helped sway the election in Joe Biden’s favor, as 17 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known.
MRC Free Speech America has also separately documented Facebook’s interference in elections 39 times since 2008.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
