Facebook insider goes public: 'Suppression' for conservatives

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A Facebook insider has confirmed the social-media giant discriminates against conservatives through software manipulation, using "special features" to "deboost" their traffic, especially near elections.

The former employee of the Big Tech firm now works with James O'Keefe's Project Veritas, which released a video of her testimony.

She was a content review analyst for the intellectual property department, dealing with copyright and trademark claims.

As part of her work, she noticed some odd things on various accounts.

For example, one of the company's engineers, Danny Ben David, had created an item called "actiondeboostlivedistribution" and was attaching it to accounts belonging to conservatives.

The insider said the obvious intent was to prevent distribution of that particular page or video.

It was one of the "methods of suppression," she said.

It was done by disabling routine features on the page such as notifications.

"I would see it on several different conservatives pages," she said, noting pages for Mike Cernovich, Steven Crowder and the Daily Caller.

She also pointed out Facebook was doing the throttling and even taking down material without letting the user know.

The insider noted company CEO Mark Zuckerberg's claim to Congress, "We want to make sure we have the widest possible expression."

He said he didn't want his company acting on the political ideology of content.

But the former Facebook employee said that's exactly what is not happening.

Project Veritas tried to obtain comment from David, who refused.

Another Facebook employee behind the campaign was Seiji Yamamoto, who wrote internally about his "news feed reduction strategy."

He was concerned about "hate speech" but said there's "quite a bit of content near the perimeter of hate speech that we need to address as well."

Yamamoto described it as speech that "offends."

Facebook, the report explained, also targets right-leaning individuals and organizations by labeling terms they use as offensive. One example was "MSM," for mainstream media.

Yamamoto also refused to comment to Project Veritas.

The strategy includes "drastically limited bandwidth," auto logouts for users and posts that "fail to upload."

"They believe the election of Donald Trump was a fluke, it shouldn't have happened," the insider said, so Facebook is now trying to "influence elections."

The company internally even discussed ratting out people it considers offensive by notifying everyone in their friends network.

"Fear of being outed … is what regulates behavior in real life and we should reintroduce that to the online world," the company's internal discussion noted.

Project Veritas posted online documents supporting the insider.

Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said that to expose dishonesty and censorship in big tech companies, he will be relying upon more insiders, informants and leakers in the future.

"Our future depends on those who are willing to give up everything for what they believe."

"When approached for comment, author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich said the troubling issue is that Facebook could just 'make stuff up' about people through these systems. 'Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn't like. The person accused not only can’t do anything about the allegation, they don’t even have an idea the allegation was made,' said Cernovich," Project Veritas said.