A Meta senior software engineer admitted that the social media business editors users who post negative information about Vice President Kamala Harris in a video captured by an O’Keeefe Media Group undercover blogger.
Asked by an undercover journalist how Meta handles what Democrats describe as “hate speech” from Republican social media users, Jeveean Gyawali, a senior software engineer at Meta, said that Meta’s Integrity Team has developed” civic classifiers”, which he described as” a really large model that’s been trained on civic content”.
Gyawali said,” So something that it detects to be a political material is, like, demoted”. The software engineer added that” political classification” describes “political information” that is “automatically never shown”.
” Related products is not going to show up in your serve”, Gyawali added. Like ads that I believe can be shown up and that they likely have a different vetting procedure, but “unconnected content,” like, say your uncle in, say, Ohio said something about Kamala Harris being unfit for the presidency because she does n’t have a child. That kind of sh-t is quickly demoted”.
Gyawali told the undercover columnist that the company’s political classification “is powerful” and that any information that violated it would be “demoted 100 percentage”.
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Asked whether a “demoted” social internet users would be notified of the company’s behavior, Gyawali said,” The man would not be notified”. Gyawali also said that if a person had various political classification transgressions, they had been “redlisted” and” shadowbanned”.
The undercover journalist also expressed concerns to Gyawali about a “repeat of 2016 in 2024,” prompting the Meta engineer to claim that the company had established a” SWAT team” earlier this year” just to think about all the possible ways the platform can be abused.”
James O’Keefe, O’Keefe Media Group leader, explained that Gyawali’s feedback reflected the evidence of a Twitter whistleblower who recently told O’Keefe in 2019 that the social media platform was “deboosting” people. O’Keefe also made reference to a movie in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and another business executive discussed how” fact seekers” were punished on social media.
O’Keeefe noted that Gyawali’s discovery that Meta is continuing its “practices of demoting articles” comes just before Election Day.
O’Keeefe confronted Gyawali over the phone regarding the remarks the senior software engineer made to the covert journalist, and he said,” Ah f-ck,” and quickly ended the conversation.