META Censorship Practices: 'Pro-Trump' posts 'go to a team to take it down"

Second Round of Meta Engineers Reveal Censorship Practices: “Pro-Trump” Posts “Go Just Up to Another Team to Take It Down"

“Usually the disinformation we saw was pro-Trump... We'll investigate, and then it goes just up to another team to take it [the post] down,” admits Matthew Fowler (@mattsfowler), a Software Engineering Manager at Meta, during an undercover date with an O’Keefe Media Group journalist. Fowler emphasized that Meta’s investigations often rely on mainstream media for verification, stating, “The news is going to do their job, and then based on what the outlets say… you have to trust that.”

Plamen Dzhelepov (@PlamenDzhelepov), a Machine Learning Engineer at Meta, agreed, “Meta has the right to suppress anything,” acknowledging the company’s political bias by noting, “they're biased if they do that against the Republicans.” Dzhelepov detailed Meta’s censorship capabilities, confirming they target “crazy conspiracy right-wing people,” actively demoting their opinions.

Michael Zoorob (@MichaelZoorob), a Data Scientist at Meta, described the fact-checking process, stating, “the fundamental problem is that... the vast majority of what fact-checkers label as false is shared by conservatives,” admitting that any policy demoting content labeled false by fact-checkers disproportionately affects conservatives.

When addressing misinformation, Dzhelepov explained Meta's approach: “it's either censored or it says a [community note] thing, where it says, 'this is disinformation, it's probably fake' under the post," adding that Meta “actually suppresses certain voices.” Zoorob also recalled how Meta had downranked the Hunter Biden laptop story upon the FBI's warning, stating, “We just downranked it,” making the post less visible in users' feeds.”

H/T James O'Keefe

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