Twitter direct messaging engineer Pranay Singh admitted to mass-banning accounts that express interest in God, guns, and America, during a Project Veritas investigation.
“Just go to a random [Trump] tweet and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like, guns, God, ‘Merica, and with the American flag and the cross,” declared Singh, who was secretly recorded by Project Veritas reporters. “Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot.”
After being asked whether he could get rid of the accounts, he replied, “Yeah. You just delete them, but, like, the problem is there are hundreds of thousands of them, so you’ve got to, like, write algorithms that do it for you.”
Project Veritas Bombshell: Twitter Engineers Explain How They 'Shadow Ban' Conservatives, from @PJMedia_com: https://t.co/93XSRktwvJpic.twitter.com/0vc3bHLuAk
— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) January 11, 2018
“So if there’s like ‘American, guns,’ [in the account bio] can you write an algorithm to just take all those people out?” asked one undercover reporter.
“Umm, yeah, it’s actually how we do it,” Singh replied. “You look for ‘Trump,’ or ‘America,’ or any of, like, five thousand, like, keywords to describe a redneck, and then you look, and you parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then look for stuff that matches that stuff… You assign a value to each thing, so like Trump would be .5, a picture of a gun would be like 1.5, and if the total comes up above a certain value, then it’s a bot.”
An undercover reporter then asked Singh whether the “majority of the algorithms” are “against conservatives or liberals,” to which he responded, “I would say a majority of it are for Republicans, because they’re all from Russia, and they wanted Trump to win.”
“So you would mostly just get rid of conservatives?” asked the reporter.
“Yeah,” he replied.
Other former and current Twitter employees also revealed Twitter’s censorship tools and tactics during the Project Veritas investigation, with several individuals admitting to “shadow banning” pro-Trump accounts, conservatives, and “shitty people.”
Shadow banning is the act of banning a user from a platform without them realizing. Shadow-banned users will typically be removed from the public eye, so other users cannot see or interact with them, however since the user is not alerted to the shadow-ban, they will not understand why their posts suddenly receive no engagement.
A new video released Thursday by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas reveals that Twitter workers have ways to ban users of its social-media platform without letting them know.
The video shows former Twitter software employee Abhinov Vadrevu, during a conversation at a San Francisco restaurant just days ago, calling it “shadow banning.”
“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,” he said.
WND reported earlier this week on a Project Veritas video that revealed Twitter employees are willing to use their access to President Trump’s account to bring down the nation’s commander-in-chief.
Employee Clay Haynes, who has worked at the company since 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile, spoke to an undercover journalist from Project Veritas on Jan. 3. Haynes said the company would be “more than happy to help the DOJ with their little investigation.”
Haynes, a self-declared “bleeding-heart liberal,” also outlined specific ways the company could help take down the president, including providing every single tweet Trump has made, even those that have been deleted, as well as any direct messages.
Direct messages are usually regarded as private.
Haynes openly declared his desire to end the Trump administration.
“He’s dangerous, I don’t like him and he’s a terrible human being and I want to get rid of him,” Haynes states in the video.
The second video, above, reveals Twitter workers explaining steps the social media company takes to censor political content its workers don’t like.
Twitter worker Steven Pierre also told of news ways the company will be able to censor users.
“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.”
The video shows also shows Olinda Hassan, a manager for Twitter’s trust and safety team, explaining at a Twitter holiday party that the development of a system of “down ranking” “sh—- people” is in the works.
She said: “Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the sh—- people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.”
Also, a former content review agent, Mo Norai, notes the offhanded censorship that’s become routine.
“If it was a pro-Trump thing and I’m anti-Trump. … I banned his whole account … it’s at your discretion,” he said.
Pranay Singh, another worker, explained the company’s operations.
“Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.”
Wondered O’Keefe: “What kind of world do we live in where computer engineers are the gatekeepers of the ‘way people talk?’ This investigation brings forth information of profound public importance that educates people about how free they really are to express their views online.”
The earlier video is here:
This is war.
And Twitter, Google and YouTube may have finally met their match in a group of high-profile conservatives who accuse tech and social-media giants of discrimination.
Republican political consultant Roger Stone and former Breitbart senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos are reportedly planning to file a lawsuit against Twitter in February.
Also, a Republican congressman is about to call for congressional hearings to probe alleged discrimination against conservatives by Twitter, YouTube, Google and others, the Hollywood Reporter revealed Thursday.
The news just as WND reported explosive video released by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas revealed Twitter employees are willing to use their access to President Trump’s account to bring down the nation’s commander in chief.
Twitter employee Clay Haynes, who has worked at the company since 2016, spoke to an undercover journalist from Project Veritas on Jan. 3. Haynes, a self-declared “bleeding-heart liberal,” outlined specific ways the company could help take down the president, including providing every single tweet Trump has made, even those that have been deleted, as well as any direct messages. Direct messages are usually regarded as private. Haynes openly declared his desire to end the Trump administration.
As WND reported Tuesday, James Damore, the Google employee who was fired after writing a memo accusing the tech giant of “alienating conservatives” at its Bay Area headquarters, filed a class-action lawsuit along with another former Google engineer, David Gudeman, for wrongful termination.
The suit, filed Monday in Santa Clara Superior Court in California, charges Google discriminated against them and other employees for their political views and for being white males.
“Damore, Gudeman, and other class members were ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males,” the lawsuit alleges. “This is the essence of discrimination – Google formed opinions about and then treated Plaintiffs not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in groups with assumed characteristics.”
It cites violation of the California labor code for, among other things, discriminating against an employee for engaging in political activities, threatening employees with termination as “a means of coercing or influencing employees’ political activities” and discrimination on the basis of gender or race.
The complaint states Google employees and managers “strongly preferred to hear the same orthodox opinions regurgitated repeatedly, producing an ideological echo chamber, a protected, distorted bubble of groupthink.”
When Damore and Gudeman “challenged Google’s illegal employment practices, they were openly threatened and subjected to harassment and retaliation from Google,” the complaint charges.
“Google created an environment of protecting employees who harassed individuals who spoke out against Google’s view or the ‘Googley way,’ as it is sometimes known internally. Google employees knew they could harass Plaintiffs with impunity, given the tone set by managers – and they did so.”
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