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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.

Worst Censorship of Sept: Big Tech Election Interference Kicks Into High Gear

Elections

October 4, 2024 2020 election, big tech

Worst Censorship of Sept: Big Tech Election Interference Kicks Into High Gear

Big Tech censorship has kicked into high gear just in time for the 2024 elections.

Google-owned YouTube, Amazon, TikTok, Meta-owned Facebook, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn and X all cracked down on free speech — especially election-related content — during the month of September. X suspiciously targeted a former President Donald Trump-affiliated account just before the presidential debate, while Facebook and Amazon Alexa displayed explicit pro-Vice President Kamala Harris bias. YouTube was busy censoring content about Christian persecution and Jan. 6, while LinkedIn continued to enforce COVID-19 groupthink. And over at TikTok, the Communist Chinese government-tied app dubiously removed an exposé about Orwellian digital IDs.

Below are several of the worst examples of Big Tech censorship found in MRC Free Speech America’s exclusive CensorTrack database from the month of September.

1) Amazon Alexa urges users to vote for Harris, not Trump. Multiple X users postedvideos of themselves asking Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa the reasons they should vote for Trump. “I cannot provide responses that endorse any political party or its leader,” Alexa responded, according to Fox News Digital. When Fox News Digital tested it an additional time, Alexa responded, saying, “I cannot promote content that supports a certain political party or a specific politician. Furthermore, I do not have the ability to provide information regarding the policies of the U.S. government. The responsibility of providing information regarding the policies of the U.S. government lies with the government itself.”

The Amazon assistant did, however, providereasons to vote for Vice President and Democrat nominee for president Harris, including “that she is a female of color with a comprehensive plan to address racial injustice and inequality throughout the country” and “promises a tough-on-crime approach to battling the violent crime wave that has swept the nation in recent years.”

Of course, Amazon, as Big Tech companies so often do, claimed to Fox News Digital that “[t]his was an error that was quickly fixed.”

2) X imposes pre-debate censorship. Ahead of the first presidential debate between former Trump and Harris, Trump War Room, the “official War Room account of the 2024 Trump campaign,” shared a video of Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) ripping the Biden-Harris administration for America’s inflation crisis. Trump War Room captioned the post, “@ByronDonalds: ‘Inflation when Donald Trump left office was 1.4% year-over-year… When Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came into office, many states were already back to work… and when they wanted to his ‘American Rescue Plan,’ which she co-signed, we told them on Capitol Hill, you’re going to create a labor shortage, which is going to create inflation.’” In response, X initially slapped an interstitial over the video saying, “Content warning: Adult Content. X labeled this post as containing Adult Content.” Several other posts were similarly labeled, including Trump War Room’s video post of a BBC News clip showing voters criticizing Harris. “Former Pennsylvania steel worker: ‘I would believe Donald Trump. I don’t believe Harris. She’s been there three and a half years and hasn’t done nothing,’” Trump War Room wrote in the post.

3) Facebook runs interference for pro-abortion propaganda. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (FRC), challenged ABC News’s presidential debate moderators who contradicted Republican presidential candidate Trump’s accusation that there are states that legally allow infanticide. Perkins’s Facebook post had an FRC map showing 15 states that have no legal protections for babies born alive after an attempted abortion. Facebook initially hid the map behind an interstitial, wrongly asserting, “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.” The interstitial was later removed, but the warning label remained, linking to leftist fact-checker PolitiFact’s claim, “No legal protections for ‘born alive’ babies in some states? Experts say that’s wrong.” Users were also forced to click to confirm that they wished to share the post.

4) TikTok removes video exposing digital ID program for unspecified reasons. Evita Duffy-Alfonso, Bongino Report’s Early Edition with Evitahost, posted a clip of her Sept. 4 show on TikTok, “The new world order is closing in on us fast. Kenya’s multi-billion dollar digital ID system intends to digitize citizen’s biometric data.” It included a clip of Kenya’s Interior and National Administration cabinet secretary Kithure Kindiki explaining the “automated biometric identification system, which … involves the iris, fingerprints as well as facial recognition.” She subsequently shared a screenshot on X showing TikTok removed the clip for allegedly violating “our Community Guidelines.”

5) YouTube censors description of Christian persecution. Radio talk show host Michael Savage said in a live broadcast on X and Facebook that YouTube suspended him for a week after he shared an eight-year-old compilation video. One of his listeners had compiled clips of Savage discussing Christmas, the genocide of Christians by Muslims in the Middle East and efforts to help persecuted Christians. YouTube’s removal notice described some of the video’s content as “violent or graphic.” While the video wasn’t removed, YouTube issued a strike and a one-week suspension against Savage’s account.

6) X censors post about reports of illegal migrants eating pets. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project posted on its X account, “We have obtained an Aug. 28 police report from Springfield, Ohio where a caller alleged that their cat was stolen and chopped up. We have not verified any of the allegations and are disclosing the source material only due to immense public interest.” The post also showed a screenshot of a police report page. X imposed an interstitial filter over the video requiring users to click through the warning: “Content warning: Adult Content. X labeled this post as containing Adult Content.”

7) Microsoft’s LinkedIn still enforces COVID-19 dogma. Dr. Mary Talley Bowden MD, a critic of government and leftist COVID-19 narratives, stated that LinkedIn removed a post from her account as “misinformation.” She said in her post the following: “Unexplained rashes, serious severe pain, fatigue, POTS, neurological tinnitus, Bell’s palsy, stroke,… .” In a follow up X post, she completed the thought she began in the LinkedIn post, “… stroke, myocarditis… yet these [COVID-19] shots are still on the market.”

8) YouTube Is still obsessed with January 6. The Babylon Bee posted a trailer for its January 6 mockumentary. YouTube imposed a fact-checking label linking to the January 6 Wikipedia page, saying, “On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob of supporters of then–U.S. President Donald Trump in an attempted self-coup d’état two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.” The Babylon Bee is a member of MRC’s Free Speech Alliance.

WATCH: MRC’s Bozell Sounds Alarm on Google’s Latest Election Interference

Elections

September 26, 2024 big tech

WATCH: MRC’s Bozell Sounds Alarm on Google’s Latest Election Interference

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell sounded the alarm over Google’s latest censorship scheme and accused the tech giant of “deliberately” manipulating its algorithms to sway the election.

Bozell joined Thursday’s episode of Fox Business’s Varney & Co. to detail a new MRC study exposing Google for actively boosting leftist media outlets—most of which are notoriously hostile towards the right—in search results related to the 2024 election. The findings also show Google elevated the campaign website of Vice President Kamala Harris and buried former President Donald Trump’s.

“Google is deliberately playing with the algorithms to deliberately change the electoral count. If that isn’t tampering with democracy, I just don’t know what is,” Bozell told host Stuart Varney, summarizing the MRC findings.

“Google is deliberately playing with the algorithms to deliberately change the electoral count. If that isn’t tampering with democracy, I don’t know what is.”
MRC’s @BrentBozell eviscerates Google’s election interference with @Varneyco on @FoxBusiness pic.twitter.com/FJMkMz8YdY
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) September 26, 2024
Read the Damning Study: Google Up to Same Tricks? Search Giant Pushes Wildly Biased News Above Trump Website

The MRC report showed that Google consistently yielded results from leftist outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico when users searched for “donald trump presidential race 2024.” Unsurprisingly, the same leftist outlets dominated search results when the query was changed to “kamala harris presidential race 2024.”

Bozell suggested that Google’s boosting of Harris’s website, and leftist outlets that favor the Democratic Party nominee, may amount to illegal campaign contributions that the government should look into.

“If you want to do something to affect the campaign, make a political contribution within the limits of the law. If this were a political contribution, it would be literally in the billions of dollars of a contribution, which would make it illegal,” Bozell emphasized during the Fox Business interview.

When Varney asked how Americans can counter the “left-wing” push on platforms like Google, Bozell offered a blunt solution: “You’re only going to do that when the government intercedes on this.”

Google, which has earned a notorious reputation for ignoring MRC’s repeated requests for comments and explanations, attempted to save face by dismissing the study’s findings in remarks to Fox Business.

ICYMI: Mum! Google Fails to Respond to Bozell’s Challenge, Does Not Refute Election Interference

“Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,” the tech giant claimed, failing to address why leftist outlets are promoted.

The tech giant also dismissed the report as based on a “single rare search term on a single day several weeks ago.” This line of defense conveniently ignored the numerous MRC studies that busted the tech giant meddling in U.S. elections, dating back to 2008.

Related: 41 Times Google Has Interfered in US Elections 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.

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