Project Veritas – Twitter Silences Conservatives, Ready to Give Private Trump Tweets to DOJ
In two new Project Veritas videos, James O’Keefe reports that a Senior Twitter Engineer says that they are ready at any time to expose Donald Trump’s personal tweets to the DOJ. Twitter also engages in “shadow banning,” a practice of getting rid of political opinions to which they are opposed.
In the first video, Twitter Engineer Clay Haynes is captured saying that the company is more than happy to hand over Trump’s DM (Direct messages) for the DOJ’s “little investigation,” even the ones he’s deleted.
The second video comes from 8 former and current engineers who said that Twitter engages in shadow banning to silence the opinions of Conservatives or to quote one person in the video, “shitty people.”
BREAKING: Sr Network Security Engineer Reveals Twitter Ready to Give Trump’s Private DMs to DOJ — WATCH FULL: https://t.co/Pqe70vH8Re pic.twitter.com/aYKmMR61Ep
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 10, 2018
BREAKING NEW UNDERCOVER VIDEO: Twitter Engineers To “Ban a Way of Talking” Through “Shadow Banning,” Algorithms to Censor Opposing Political Opinions #ShadowBanhttps://t.co/Tqrd4FBr2v
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 11, 2018
Twitter Trust & Safety Manager: “we’re trying to ‘down rank’… shitty people to not show up,” “we’re working [that] on right now” pic.twitter.com/cXuek1qIrw
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 11, 2018
Not to mention Twitter suspense people for calling people ‘Snowflake’, but allows their liberals to use foul language and threats. Example: https://t.co/rPm3lDp1Lh
— Harry Kary (@Harry_Kary) January 11, 2018
The problem is that this is not consistently applied and people who simply disagree with progressivism are often targeted by these measures. Really eye-opening video here. https://t.co/PnUIa3cyjq
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) January 11, 2018
Of course, Executives at Twitter had something to say in response to the videos. On the first video about Trump, they stated,
“The individual depicted in this video was speaking in a personal capacity and does not represent or speak for Twitter. Twitter only responds to valid legal requests, and does not share any user information with law enforcement without such a request..”
Yesterday @jack at Twitter issued the following statement, that it was just a rogue employee. What is Twitter’s statement now that it’s eight “rogue” employees on video saying they target political ideas they don’t like? pic.twitter.com/2jUoDeZfXO
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 11, 2018
Shadow Banning
Twitter also complained about the “underhanded” way the videos were created. Not that they are doing something “underhanded” but that Project Veritas is deceptive. For the second video, they responded:
“Twitter does not shadowban accounts. We do take actions to downrank accounts that are abusive, and mark them accordingly so people can still to click through and see these Tweets if they so choose.”
Funny, many Conservatives say that either they can’t see the tweets of James O’Keefe, and others, or their own disappear. Joe Newby, Editor-in-Chief of the Conservative Firing Line says he has reason to believe his blog’s Twitter feed — @co_firing_line — has also been shadow-banned.
Apparently they think Conservatives are “shitty people.”
Project Veritas noted these statements:
“One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content. So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.” Abhinov Vadrevu former Twitter engineer
“Every single conversation is going to be rated by a machine and the machine is going to say whether or not it’s a positive thing or a negative thing. And whether it’s positive or negative doesn’t (inaudible), it’s more like if somebody’s being aggressive or not. Right? Somebody’s just cursing at somebody, whatever, whatever. They may have point, but it will just vanish… It’s not going to ban the mindset, it’s going to ban, like, a way of talking.” Twitter Software Engineer Steven Pierre
From new algorithms to the use of machines to judge accounts, Twitter is in the cross hairs of controversy yet again. Their response to the videos is defensive and fails to address that their own employees have outed their ‘underhanded’ actions.
H/T Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children
Related:
- New initiative exposes censorship of Christians, conservatives by Facebook, Twitter
- PragerU sues Google, YouTube over alleged censorship of conservative videos
- Weaponized censorship? Google falsely claims article contains ‘adult’ content
- Facebook ‘assures’ MRC’s Bozell no political censorship in ‘fake news’ effort…
- Facebook bans conservatives for complaining about censorship of conservatives
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