A former Facebook employee has leaked a set of video recordings that allegedly claims to show several of coworkers who were Anti-Trump and had a bias against Conservatives flagging and deleting their content off the social media.
Project Veritas, which is an American right-wing activist group that uses "disguises and hidden cameras to uncover supposed liberal bias and corruption" in its latest released video, exposed the content moderators working for a third party contractor for Facebook. Since the release of the video, hashtag expose Facebook [#ExposeFacebook] has been trending.
In the video, the Facebook content moderators were heard discussing different methods they use to censor supporters of President Donald Trump and Conservatives on the social media platform.
Zach McElroy, who was a content moderator at Cognizant, a company hired by Facebook to monitor content on its platform told Project Veritas that he grew concerned after seeing the bias among the moderators.
McElroy claimed that he was concerned that the Facebook moderations were politically biased after he noticed 'Civic Harassment queue' that contains a list of Facebook posts that possibly violated Facebook's Community guidelines.
The majority of items on the list contained Republican pages, including many conservative politicians, journalists or other words anyone who supported US President Donald Trump.
McElroy in his Project Veritas interview said he was ready to testify under oath before the Congress that three-quarters of the flagged posts he saw were targeting people on a specific political spectrum.
"For 75 to 80 percent of the posts to be targeting Republicans and conservatives, you can say it was a bot. But somebody had to design the algorithm. So really, somebody at Facebook," Zach McElroy said in the video released by Project Veritas on Tuesday.
In the secretly filmed Project Veritas footage, the Cognizant employees reveal Facebook's moderation policy and how the moderators flag posts. "If you see a conservative post you just get rid of it, right?" a person described by Project Veritas as a journalist asked.
"Yes, I don't give no f**ks, I'll delete it," an unnamed content moderator replied.
Steve Grimmett, Cognizant team leader for content review, was recorded describing Facebook as "a very progressive company who's very anti-MAGA," while another unnamed monitor claimed that it's "common sense" to delete posts with #MAGA in them.
"If someone is wearing a MAGA hat I'm going to delete them for terrorism," admitted another post-moderating colleague. One of the team's managers is recorded saying: "Gotta get the Cheeto [Trump] out of office."
McElroy also revealed that an internal Facebook memo allowed for a graphic image of Trump's throat being cut to stay on the platform, while cartoons that depicted Democrat Beto O'Rourke getting shot were deleted.
